Average internet connection speeds up by 26 percent globally

"We're now seeing a 15 Mbps adoption rate of 25 percent worldwide", Belson added.

India's state of the internet was recorded by Akamai during the Q4 2016 period, where it grabbed the 97th position with 5.6Mbps average connectivity speed from a lagging 105 rank until three months ago.

"Internet connection speeds continued to show positive long-term trends around the world, with particularly strong year-over-year increases across all broadband adoption metrics", Belson clarified.

NBN acknowledged the results in a press release, and said that consideration should be given to the fact that Akamai's report measures "average speeds delivered at a point in time across 10 million services most of which are old ADSL services, not the actual speeds the nbn™ network can deliver".

As usual the highest average broadband speeds were primarily in the eastern part of the U.S. The District of Columbia had the highest average connection speed - 26.7 Mbps - in the fourth quarter of 2016.

The report also shows that Australia scored a distant 67th place globally for 4 Mbps or higher broadband adoption, at just 76%.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, almost 807 million unique IPv4 addresses connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which is a 0.4% decrease as compared to the fourth quarter of 2015. The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a globally deployed platform that daily serves about two trillion web content requests.

There was significantly less IPv4 allocation/assignment activity in the fourth quarter, with 6.4 million addresses allocated/assigned versus 16 million in the third quarter.

For 10Mbps adoption, 14 percent of Internet connections were found to be above that speed, a 116 percent rise quarter-on-quarter, and 418 percent rise year-on-year.

Once again, South Korea had the fastest average connection speed of any nation in the world, with a 4Q16 speed of 26.1 Mbps.

The quarter also saw a series of disruptions, including technical issues at the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) which were blamed for a sudden drop in traffic to the country in December.