It is not only India’s GDP that is slowing but now even its broadband speed is following the slowdown tune.

According to a ‘State of the Internet’ report by Akamai Technologies, a cloud computing technology provider, India’s average broadband connection speed was 1 Mbps, which is the lowest in the Asia- Pacific region.

When compared with a global average of 2.8 Mbps connection speed, India is low on the totem pole. Neighbour China had average broadband speeds of 1.6 Mbps, according to the Akamai report.

This report is based on data gathered from Akamai and provides insight into key global statistics, including connection speeds, attack traffic, and network connectivity and availability.

Broadband services

Interestingly, despite the rollout of 3G and 4G, Indian telcos do not figure anywhere in broadband services rolled out for consumers with smartphones, laptops and tablet computers in the Asia-Pacific region.

Australia’s mobile phone providers had the highest average connection speed, at 2453 kbps, while Malaysia had the highest average peak connection speed at 18,994 kbps.

However, average broadband connection in peak times in India bettered other countries, notably China. Connection was estimated at 8 Mbps in India and China’s average peak time broadband connection was measured at 7.1 Mbps. India and China were almost 50 per cent lower when compared to the global peak time broadband connection, which was estimated at 15.9 Mbps.

According to industry watchers, one of the reasons for India’s better peak time broadband connection speeds was due to Internet Service Providers stacking up multiple connections in the limited bandwidth.

For the second quarter in a row, Brazil experienced the greatest year-on-year growth with 39 per cent when measured on the most unique IPv4 addresses connecting to Akamai and China showed the largest quarterly increase with 7 per cent.

Cyber attacks

India contributed to 2.5 per cent when it came to cyber attacks, much lower than China, which seems to be a favourite of hackers with 33 per cent of them attacking computers all over the world from the region, the report pointed out.

Akamai maintains a distributed set of agents deployed across the Internet that monitors attack traffic and collects data, according to its spokesperson.

>venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in