HONG KONG — So where does your country rank when it comes to Internet speed?
Akamai Technologies, the cloud platform provider, says that Asia enjoys the fastest Internet speeds in the world. But, in the alternative, Asia also is the largest source of cyber attack traffic.
The top recorded speed of 54.1 megabits per second was documented in Hong Kong in the third quarter of 2012, according to the company's "State of the Internet" report issued this week.
South Korea and Japan each had average peak connection speeds of 48.8 Mbps and 42.2 Mbps, respectively. Previously, no other country or territory had gone beyond 50 Mbps.
As for average connection speeds, South Korea topped the charts with highest average speed of 14.7 Mbps. It was followed by Japan with 10.7 Mbps and Hong Kong with 8.9 Mbps.
The U.S. registered an average connection speed of 7.2 Mbps, with average peak connection speed of 29.6 Mbps. The U.K., meanwhile had a 6.3 Mbps average connection speed, with average peak connection speed of 28.1 Mbps.
The countries with higher Internet speeds were the ones from where most of the cyber attacks originated, according to the report.
China attributed to 33 percent of all the attack traffic found in third quarter of 2012. Akamai found that the second leading country for cyber attacks was the U.S., with Russia a distant third.
"During the quarter, the top 10 countries/regions were responsible for generating 72 percent of the observed attack traffic. Within the top 10, slightly more than 50 percent of attack traffic was generated by three countries: China, the U.S. and Russia," Akamai wrote in its report.