Akamai, leader of CDN traffic released their first “State of the Internet, Q1 2015” report for 2015, giving internet users and network administrators a look at countries’ IPv6 rollouts, average broadband speeds, and 3G & 4G speeds. Akamai bases the report on data aggregated from their Akamai Intelligent Platform, providing insight into global statistics such as fastest connection speeds on both broadband and mobile networks, connection disruptions, mobile browser usage trends, and ultimately the ongoing rollout of IPv6, as well as IPv4 exhaustion.
Akamai has declared that the clear leader in IPv6 adoption is Belgium, with a rate of 33% of all connections to Akamai’s CDN from Belgium routing over IPv6. Following Belgium was Germany, with 16% of traffic being delivered over IPv6, an almost 10% change from the last quarter. In third place was the United States for IPv6 adoption, with 14% of traffic delivered over IPv6, a 16% change from last quarter.
Cable and wireless / mobile providers continue to drive the largest volume of IPv6 traffic, with many of these ISPs leading the way for IPv6 in their respective countries. Two notable mobile ISPs include US based Verizon Wireless, and Brutele, with over 50% of traffic being delivered over IPv6 to mobile devices. Meanwhile, T-Mobile and Comcast have more than a quarter of their traffic delivered over IPv6, showing great progress in an area where others lack. In addition to active IPv6 traffic, Akamai has also seen a fair share of IPv6 deployment across numerous countries, as seen below:
Another interesting metric measured was the average speed of global internet connections, where Akamai saw a 10% increase during the first quarter of 2015, increasing to 5 Mbps. The top ten countries for speed include :
- South Korea: 23.6 Mbps
- Ireland: 17.4 Mbps
- Hong Kong: 16.7 Mbps
- Sweden: 15.8 Mbps
- Netherlands: 15.3 Mbps
- Japan: 15.2 Mbps
- Switzerland: 14.9 Mbps
- Norway: 14.1 Mbps
- Latvia: 13.8 Mbps
- Finland: 13.7 Mbps.
Missing from the top 10 is the United States, while the top 10 states all saw a speed gain in the first quarter of 2015, with areas such as the District of Columbia posting a 20% quarterly speed gain. While six states have crossed an average rate of 15Mbps, none have met the new FCC’s broadband definition. These numbers are expected to exceed in the next 12 months, as broadband will soon be mandated to be above 25 Mbps.
As we see the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, it’s expected that IPv6 will be adopted over the next 12 months in larger volumes, simply due to the lack of resources to scale on IPv4. I also imagine with the new FCC broadband mandate of 25Mbps, the roll out of such high speed DOCSIS 3.0 plans such as Time Warner Cable ‘MAXX’ and of course Google Fiber being rolled out in extra cities, we’ll see the United States back in the top 10 soon, if not by the third or fourth quarter of 2015.