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Last week, my colleague David Strom reported on the latest annual "State of the Internet" report from content delivery network Akamai. The report showed that while Americans are finally experiencing faster average broadband speeds on a quarter-by-quarter basis, those speeds only began eclipsing those of Sweden in the second half of 2010, and still have about 40% of gap to close if it hopes to achieve par with Japan - which, at this rate, it might do in about a decade.

If Web connection speeds are, as Google has said so often in touting the performance of its Chrome Web browser, essentially a product of end user perception, then perhaps any technology that applies itself solely to improving that perception will be at least as worthy of investment, if not more so, than investing in the Internet backbone itself. That's the conclusion Akamai itself has reached in its buyout of two-year-old Web front-end optimization service Blaze.

Akamai delivers a lot of content around the globe and every quarter they look at overall trends in bandwidth and connectivity. The 2Q11 report is out now and like the last edition, you can have some fun with choosing particular states or countries and graphing their overall trends right on the home page linked above. Akamai carries a lot of the big-ticket Internet traffic across its network, ranging up to a third of overall global traffic.

That streaming videos makes up a huge percentage of the Internet's traffic is by now well-known. Netflix alone makes up nearly 30% of all downstream traffic and we're now accustomed to hearing about the extraordinary amount of bandwidth eaten up by videos streaming during major news events.

For example, during President Obama's inauguration, content delivery network Akamai delivered 7 million simultaneous streams of video, with traffic surpassing two terabytes per second (Tbps), which broke records. The next year, Akamai's network traffic peaked at about 3.45 Tbps.

Internet content hosting provider Akamai released its latest "State of the Internet" report today for the first quarter of 2011. The report shows a slight increase of 5% in total IP addresses connected to their network from last quarter and an overall increase in 20% from last year. Italy replaced Canada as the source of traffic in the top ten countries.

With the increasing amount of bandwidth we're all sucking down these days, it's no surprise that we often feel like our Internet speeds just aren't fast enough. But how fast are our connections? And how does one country stack up against another? Royal Pingdom has released some data today, based on information from the CDN provider Akamai that compares connections speeds internationally. The report looks at the "real world speeds" (not just what service providers advertise) for people in the 50 countries with the most Internet users - all told 1.8 billion Internet users.

Digital platform company Akamai has released its latest State of the Internet Report. The report covers the last quarter of 2009.

Among the findings are the persistence of Russia as the top location for attack traffic and of South Korea for speed of web connections.The number of unique ports attacked has increased by almost three times what it was in Q3.

Looking at data from the third quarter of 2009, content delivery network Akamai just announced that the average broadband speed in the U.S. declined by 2.4% in the third quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter in 2008. In the U.S., Delaware currently leads with 7.2 Mbps, though it remains far behind South Korea, where the average speed is almost 15 Mpbs. Currently, the U.S. is in 18th place, far behind Japan, Hong Kong, Romania and Sweden. The average U.S. broadband speed is currently 3.9 Mbps.

The president's weekly video address was often called the 'YouTube address,' but after complaints from privacy activists, the White House has now decided to leave YouTube behind and use Akamai's content delivery network to embed the president's weekly address on the White House web site. The White House will still post videos to YouTube, but, by default, it now directs visitors to Vimeo instead of Google's streaming video service.

This morning, Amazon announced that it would soon launch a content delivery network (CDN). This new service, which does not have a name yet, will be complimentary to Amazon's existing web services and will work seamlessly with S3, Amazon's online storage solution. Like most of Amazon's web services, this new product will not require a contract and does not have any minimum-usage requirements. Amazon did not announce a specific launch date, but it expects the new service to be available by the end of this year.