Soon after Google ranked South Korea as having the second-fastest desktop internet and the fastest mobile internet in the world, a new study has been released that corroborates those accolades.
Akamai, a cloud platform enterprise that keeps a close eye on these things, released its Fourth Quarter, 2011 State of the Internet report today, announcing that South Korea has both the highest average connection speed and highest average peak connection speed. In fact, even if you don’t mind to settle for an internet speed slightly slower than the best, 69 of the top 100 fastest internet cities are in the Asia Pacific – and 61 one of them are in Japan (!!!). As you can see in the table from Akamai’s interact data map illustrating the findings from the report, South Korea is topping out at over 17Mbps.
Part of the reason that South Korea’s internet is dusting the rest of the world is because it’s also the highest ranked country in high broadband adoption, with 83% of the country’s internet connections above 5Mbps. Just for larfs, here’s a comparison of South Korea with the country I live, the United States.
The United States, as it were, has a 43% adoption rate to high broadband connections. Given I don’t really feel like I have to wait around all that long to load a webpage or even stream a movie from Netflix over my DSL line, I can only imagine how corpse-fast South Koreans would think the internet here is in my neck of the woods.
Given that South Korea’s internet is so much faster, one imagines that they spend a lot less time waiting for pages to load (or download files in general), so therefore they should have a lot more extra time. Anybody wanna speculate on what they must do with all that extra time? (I’m wagering that they just use more internet with that time.)
[Via CNET.)