A new report reveals the Internet is getting faster and safer.
Not only are Internet speeds speeding up, but Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are declining, meaning the Internet is getting safer.
There were only two states that had slower average Internet speeds in the second quarter of this year compared with the first quarter, and those are Nevada and Rhode Island, according to Internet infrastructure provider Akamai's State of the Internet report. Delaware's Internet speed rose as much as 24 percent, showing the largest quarterly increase in Internet speeds. Next was Connecticut with a 17 percent increase.
Between 2013 and 2014, speed increases are even bigger. Four states in total saw an increase of more than 50 percent; Kansas with 106 percent, Maryland with 70 percent, Arkansas with 64 percent and Delaware with 50 percent.
Internet speeds in the U.S. aren't the only speeds that are increasing, however. Globally, the average Internet connection is now over 4 megabits per second, which is the threshold for "broadband" Internet. To put that in perspective, only a year ago only half of the world's Internet connections exceeded 4 Mbps and globally Internet connections have risen 21 percent, now sitting at 4.6 Mbps. The U.S. didn't make the top 10 list as far as Internet speeds goes, ranking at number 14 globally.
"The U.S. has been slow, primarily because it has a few carriers that dominate the market and that creates a lack of competitiveness," said Zeus Kerravala, analyst at ZK Research. "I think the U.S. should be embarrassed about where they sit."
While this 4 Mbps milestone may not sound like a lot for many in the United States, in countries like Brazil the average transmission speed is still less than 3 Mbps.
South Korea remains the country with the fastest mobile Internet speeds with an average of 15.2 Mbps. Australia, however, had the fastest peak mobile speed with a whopping 108 Mbps.
Internet security is also up. According to Akamai, the number of countries where attack traffic originates is down from 194 countries in the first quarter of this year to 161 in the second quarter. China remains the country where the most attack traffic originates, and it now accounts for 43 percent of all attack traffic. Indonesia now sits in second place and accounts for 15 percent. In third is the U.S., with 13 percent of all attack traffic.
DDoS traffic has also seen a decrease, with 270 distributed denial-of-service attacks reported among Akamai's customers in the second quarter of this year, compared with 283 in the first quarter. Compared with last year, there is a decrease of around 15 percent. A DDos attack aims to make a machine or network resource unavailable to users through the work of two or more people or machines such as bots who are trying to temporarily interrupt or stop service via the Internet.
