India's growth in average internet speed grew more than 20%, but lagged far behind other Asia Pacific countries like South Korea (15.7Mbps) and Japan (10.9), according to Akamai Technologies’ first quarter, 2012 State of the Internet report.

The report says that the peak internet speed in the country stood at 6.9Mbps, far behind global leader Hong Kong's 49.3Mbps Only 1.2% of connections in India have a speed of over 4Mbps, the new standard for broadband. This, however, represents an 85% increase in adoption rate in broadband speed.

When it comes to average connection speeds, all of the top 10 countries experienced positive year-over-year changes in average connection speeds.  Globally, a total of 125 countries experienced year over year increases and only 10 countries that qualified for inclusion saw declines in connection speeds.  The global average connection speed in the first quarter was 2.6 Mbps.

Once again, South Korea (15.7 Mbps) featured the fastest average connection speed. Countries/regions rounding out the top 5 included Japan (10.9 Mbps), Hong Kong (9.3 Mbps), the Netherlands (8.8 Mbps) and Latvia (8.8 Mbps).

Year over year, the global average peak connection speed increased by 25 percent, and increases were also seen across all of the top 10 countries.  Globally, nearly 130 qualifying countries saw year-over-year increases in average connection speeds, ranging from 3.8 percent growth in Pakistan (to 5.9 Mbps) to a 213 percent jump in Libya (to 3.8 Mbps).  Only five countries saw a yearly decline in average peak connection speed, with the greatest loss in Tanzania, which dropped 21 percent (to 5.1 Mbps).

In the first quarter, Hong Kong took the top spot for average peak connection speed (49.3 Mbps), dropping South Korea (47.8) to second place. The remaining top 5 included Japan (39.5 Mbps), Romania (38.8 Mbps) and Latvia (33.5 Mbps).

Mobile Connection Speeds

In the first quarter of 2012 Akamai found that a mobile provider in Germany delivered the fastest average connection speed at slightly less than 6 Mbps. Of all mobile operators tracked, five had an average connection speed of greater than 4 Mbps, while 65 mobile operators had average connection speeds greater than 1 Mbps.  Only three providers had average connection speeds below 500 kbps.

When looking at peak connection speeds for the mobile providers worldwide for which Akamai analyzed data, a provider in Hong Kong offered the highest average peak connection speed of 32.2 Mbps. A German provider came in a close second at 31.2 Mbps. Overall, six mobile operators had average peak connection speeds of greater than 20 Mbps, double the number of the previous quarter.  31 providers had average peak connection speeds above 10 Mbps and all providers had average peak connection speeds above 2 Mbps.

Global Internet Penetration

More than 666 million unique IP addresses from 238 countries and regions around the world connected to the Akamai Intelligent Platform in the first quarter of 2012. This represents a six percent increase when compared to the fourth quarter of 2011 and almost a 14 percent increase versus the first quarter of 2011.