Akamai and the State of the Internet: Canada

Akamai, the company that the big providers — Adobe, CBC, Cognos… — use to distribute their content on the internet, has released a report on the state of the internet [PDF]. They handle billions of transactions each day all over the globe (“Akamai routinely delivers between ten and twenty percent of all web traffic…”) and so their traffic data put them in a really good position to know about the comings and goings of packets.

Canada appears but once in the report: We’re tenth in the world when it comes to internet penetration (as measured by unique IP addresses against population) at .30 per capita. Sweden is first with .40 per capita, Netherlands fifth at .35, and the U.S. eighth at .32.

But we don’t even make the top ten globally when it comes to things like high broadband connectivity. The top ten countries for accessing Akamai at speeds greater than 5 Mbps are in the chart to the left. Drop that to the percentage of connections at speeds above 2 Mbps, and Canada still doesn’t make the top ten list, whopped by big hitters like Tunisia and the Bahamas among others, as you can see from the chart to the right. (The fact that the U.S. is in 24th position is of no real comfort. We aren’t told where Canada sits.)

Normally I don’t fuss too much about this sort of country ranking, but connectivity is crucial in many important respects and Canada should be working hard to deliver the best possible speeds and penetration — instead of worrying about theft of movies and locking up tunes.