Australia still lagging in global broadband race: report

Ian Grayson
Wednesday, 10 September 2008 09:19

Business IT - Networking

The report, compiled by web content distribution company Akamai, looks at internet performance around the globe, providing a snapshot of connection speeds in more than 130 countries.

According to the report, just 32 per cent per cent of Australian internet users are enjoying speeds of more than 2 megabits per second.

This compares to European countries such as Austria (63%), Belgium (90%), United Kingdom (72%) and Sweden (75%).

When looking at higher speeds the picture is even more bleak, with just 7.2 per cent of Australians getting connection speeds of more than 5Mbps. This compares with Austria (14%), Belgium (26%), and Sweden (32%). Only the UK (5.4%) is lagging behind Australia in this group.

On a more positive note, the report also found that Australia accounts for just 0.51 per cent of the globe’s internet attack traffic. This is significantly behind the leader, Japan, which accounted for 30.07 per cent of all attack traffic during the second quarter of this year. Second on the list was the United States (21.52%) followed by China (8.9%) and Germany (5.56%).