DUBAI 7 June 2017: Your Internet connection speed has increased – perhaps even shows a double digit growth, according to a new report.
It said the Middle East and Africa (MEA) average connection speed shows increase year-on-year.
“Eight out of the top 13 qualifying countries/regions saw double-digit annual increases in average connection speed, according to Akamai’s ‘First Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet Report’.
Akamai Technologies, Inc. claims to be the world’s largest cloud delivery platform.
“Increases in connection speeds and broadband penetration have helped enable the Internet to support levels of traffic that even just a few years ago would have been unimaginable,” said David Belson, editor of the State of the Internet Report.
“One need only look to January’s US Presidential Inauguration, which broke traffic records for live coverage of a single news event.”
Report Highlights
• United Arab Emirates at third spot, posted an 81.1 Mbps average peak connection speed, a 34 per cent year-on-year increase.
• Six of the surveyed MEA countries posted average peak speeds of at least 50 Mbps in the first quarter of 2017 (up from four in the third quarter of 2016, the last time this metric was published in the State of the Internet Report), and 10 had speeds of at least 25 Mbps (up from eight in the third quarter of 2016).
Mobile
• In the MEA region, Kenya had the highest average mobile connection speeds at 13.7 Mbps. The United Arab Emirates posted an average mobile connection speeds at 10 Mbps.
• Among the qualifying surveyed countries/regions, 32 in total had an average mobile connection speed at or exceeding 10 Mbps (up from 30 in the previous quarter), while 60 achieved average speeds at or above 4 Mbps (up from 58).
Disruptions
• The Iraqi government continued its practice of blocking Internet access to prevent cheating during national middle- and high-school exams, impacting traffic on several days in February.
• Traffic to Gabon on Feb. 18th and 19th dropped to approximately 25 per cent of normal levels due to an outage of uknown cause that affected eight of the country’s networks.
By Sheena Amos