Internet content delivery network Akamai released its quarterly State of the Internet report for Q3 2013. The report, which includes mobile data sourced from Ecicsson, states that the global monthly mobile data traffic (uploads + downloads) for Q3 was about 1800 Petabytes, an increase of 80% from Q3 2012. For reference, it takes 1048576 Gigabytes to make 1 Petabyte, so that’s a lot of cat photos and selfies uploaded to Facebook. Unsurprisingly, voice data remained relatively flat year-over-year.
In a survey of 74 mobile carriers, Ericsson also provided Akamai with an interesting look at the countries with the best mobile connection speeds. Russia topped the list, with one carrier offering an average connection speed of 9.5 Mbps, with a peak of 49.8 Mbps(!), well over the averaged carrier rate of 1 Mbps. Where did Canada fall? The one (unnamed) Canadian carrier in the survey had a 5.8 Mbps average and 16.7 Mbps peak, placing it relatively middle of the pack.
Akamai also had some compelling data for those interested in the ongoing platform war between iOS and Android. While Android’s Webkit’s browser regularly saw a higher percentage of requests across cellular networks in Q3 2013, Mobile Safari had the higher percentage of requests across all networks (see graphs below). In both instances, the second place browser cut into the leader’s position by the end of the quarter. It will be interesting to see if the counter-intuitive trend continued in Q4 2013 or if the numbers harmonize in Akamai’s next quarterly report.
[via]TNW[/via]
