Internet speed declines in India in favor of coverage

Among the 12 Asian countries in Akamai’s report on the ‘State of the Internet’, India is the only one that suffered a fall in Internet speed.

While most countries have been experiencing a rise in average Internet speed due to new technologies, India suffered a 9.1 percent decline in average Internet connection speed in 2010, bringing it down to 0.8mbps.

According to the report, the average Internet speed in the world was at 1.9mbps and India ranked at 143 in the list. It was revealed that over 35 percent of Internet connections in India had a speed of 256 kbps or less and only 0.4 percent were measured to have a speed in excess of 5 Mbps.

The fastest Internet connections in the world are ironically located in Asia as well. South Korea places first with an average connection speed of 13.7 Mbps and Hong Kong comes in second with 9.4 Mbps followed by Japan with 8.3 Mbps. These are called ‘high broadband’ as it crosses the 5 Mbps threshold.

India has the world’s third largest Internet population with over 100 million users as of December 2010 despite having one of the world’s lowest Internet penetration levels at 8.4%. Although Internet penetration is starting to increase in India, the quality of the connections remains to be poor, which could be a potential setback for businesses that depend on high speed Internet.