Latvia to Canadian broadband users: Eat our dust

Bad news for Rogers (T.RCI.A, NYSE: RCI, Stock Forum), Bell (T.BCE, NYSE: BCE, Stock Forum) and Shaw (T.SJR.B, NYSE: SJR, Stock Forum): While Canada and the United States have seen reasonable jumps in broadband speed and reach over the last few years, according to Akamai’s “State of the Internet” report gauging worldwide internet connection speeds, which pegs the US increase at 27%, little Latvia and the startlingly connected South Korea put the North American players in the shade as broadband pick up rates and speeds soar.



According to Akamai, South Koreans get an average connection speed of 14,182 kilobytes per second (kbps), compared to 8393 in the US and 7558 in Canada. Latvia draws an average of 9485, over 25% faster than Canadian products.

Overall, the US slipped to 9th place on the report, behind Switzerland, Hong Kong and Sweden, among others.

Canada’s mobile network connection speeds took a beating in the report, with Canada’s CA-2 registering the lowest peak connection speed of all networks tested in the Americas, behind El Salvador, Bolivia, Guatemala, Venezuela and more. Canada’s average mobile connection speed also took a pounding, ahead of only five networks out of 19 tested. This information comes at a time when Canada’s mobile operators are in the middle of a lobbying campaign to convince the Canadian government not to let Verizon (NYSE: VZ, Stock Forum) into the market under current regulations.



The report also showed that 34% of attack traffic – that is, traffic intended to disrupt services, generally for nefarious means – came from China, while Indonesia jumped from almost zero to 20% of world attack traffic in just a year. 8.3% came from the US while Canada didn’t rate.

To download the full report, visit https://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/