Broadband adoption rate in India continues its climb: Report

As per figures released at the end of a report by Akamai Technologies, broadband adoption rate in India has continued to grow, registering a year-on-year growth in excess of 100 percent, as reported by Techcircle.in. Broadband adoption quarter-over-quarter increased 17 percent. At present the moment India has only 0.1 percent connections that can be counted as high broadband connections. As per Akamai, connections at speeds of 4Mbps or higher qualify as broadband, while connections at speeds of 10Mbps or more qualify as high broadband.  

The figures and other data provided by Akamai is as a result of the data collected from the Akamai Intelligent Platform. The platform offers insights into Internet penetration, mobile connection speeds, origins of attack traffic, and other global statistics. 

0.1 percent connections in India are high broadband connections

The report found India’s average Internet connection speed to be above 1Mbps in the second quarter, registering a growth of almost five percent quarter-over-quarter. The global average connection speed, in comparison rose 13 percent to 3Mbps from the first to second quarters of 2012. 

South Korea has highest average connection speed at 14.2Mbps for the quarter. Japan came second at 10.7Mbps, followed by Hong Kong with 8.9Mbps. Kenya, however, displayed the most significant quarter-over-quarter increase in average connection speed -- 227 percent to 1.8Mbps.

India’s peak connection speed was pegged at 7.3Mbps, which is an increase of roughly six percent quarter-over-quarter. The global average peak connection speed increased 44 percent year over year. Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan continued to headline dominance with peak connection speeds of 49.2Mbps, 46.9Mbps, and 40.5Mbps respectively for the second quarter.

Further, the Akamai report listed the top countries from where attack traffic originated. Attack traffic is the traffic generated to carry out denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack). It found that China is the “single largest volume source of observed traffic” at 16 percent. US experienced a slight increase in originated attack traffic, too and took the second place with 12 percent and Turkey took the third position with an increase in the second quarter to 7.6 percent. India took the eight position with 2.9 percent.

A mobile provider in Russia managed to give the fastest mobile average connection speed in the second quarter of 7.5Mbps. The fastest mobile average peak connection speed for the quarter came from a provider in the UK at 44.4Mbps.

As part of its 'Highlights on Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st August 2012' that it released this month, TRAI found that the broadband segment in the country doesn't disappoint for the subscriber base increased from 14.68 million at the end of July 2012 to 14.82 million at the end of August 2012, registering a monthly growth of 1.37 percent. 

As on August 31, 2012, there are 149 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) providing broadband services in the country. Out of them, only 115 ISPs provided data to the TRAI for the month of August 2012. For the rest of the ISPs, data from previous month has been retained. Data from the top 10 ISPs, which constitute 93.57 percent of the total subscriber base, have been received for the month of August 2012. The top five ISPs in terms of market share, based on subscriber base are: BSNL (9.47 million), Bharti Airtel (1.37 million), MTNL (1.06 million), You Broadband (0.68 million), and Hathway (0.37 million).