It seems like just about every day there is a new report or study that looks on how video is being used more and more online. Whether that is for services like Netflix or YouTube, or it is used for marketing with video ads, all of this burns up a lot of bandwidth. Fortunately, according to a recent report published by Akamai, the global average internet speed has gone up by 23% year-over-year. This puts the global average connection speed at 6.3Mbps. Keep in mind that this includes many parts of the world that are barely getting dial up, so 6.3Mbps is really quite good.
The majority of the report focused on Europe, though they did provide a significant amount of information that will be useful to all marketers. The global average peak connection speed went up by 14% year-over-year to 34.7Mbps.
It is interesting to see that even throughout largely modern countries, the average connection speed varies greatly. Norway, which has the fastest average speeds at 21.3Mbps is significantly higher than the UK, for example, which is only running at 14.9Mbps. There are many reasons for the varying connection speeds including local geography, public investment and more.
South Korea is the fastest country in the world in terms of average connection speed, coming in at 29Mbps, followed by Norway (21.3), Sweden (20.6), and Hong Kong (19.9). As the average connection speeds continues to raise, it is becoming easier and easier for people around the world to reliability get sufficient speeds for quality video connections. This will, of course, help marketers who are looking to target a global audience.
You can see the report HERE.
