Asia’s Internet speed is not surprising news, but the details of this recent report on the Internet by Akamai show how much Asia and South Korea dominate the world of high speed Internet. Korea is also increasing the average national Internet speed at the fastest pace of any country in the world.

Korea, Japan and Hong Kong have the world’s fastest connections

Although South Korea continued to hold the top spot  as the country with the highest average measured connection speed at 14.6 Mbps, its fastest city (Masan) was ranked fifth among Asian cities, at approximately 1.2x the country average. South Korea, unsurprisingly, has six of the top 10 fastest cities in Asia, all with average speeds above 15 Mbps.

 
South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong are in global top 5 for increasing average speed.

As compared to the second quarter of 2009, South Korea saw a shift in the distribution of connections to higher speed buckets, with the 5-10 Mbps bucket declining from 35% to 29%, while the higher speed buckets all saw increases, with more than 10% of connections once again being made to Akamai at speeds greater than 25 Mbps. 
The increased percentages of extremely high speed connections are in line with South Korea’s third quarter growth in both average measured connection speed and high broadband adoption rates.
While having a high broadband adoption rate that approaches just half of South Korea’s, Hong Kong has the second highest levels of extremely high speed connectivity among the top 10 countries, with more than 2.5% of connections to Akamai at speeds between 20-25 Mbps, and more than 5% at speeds in excess of 25 Mbps. The distribution of connection speeds above 5 Mbps remained fairly flat in the United States between the second and third quarters, and the United States remained #12 globally for this metric.