If it felt like your Internet connection was getting slower, you’re not alone and you’re not imagining things. A survey by content delivery network provider Akamai found there was a decline in overall bandwidth on the Internet in 2009.
However, the reason is not that people are spending endless hours watching pointless YouTube videos. There are other reasons that have nothing to do with poor management, excessive bandwidth consumption or network congestion. So what is it? Enterprise Networking Planet knows.
The world’s fastest Internet broadband connections may be getting even faster, but that doesn’t mean that the improvements in speed are trickling down to the Internet as a whole. And there may be fewer fast connections to go around: According to Akamai’s fourth-quarter 2009 State of the Internet Report, the number of Internet connections at 2 Mbps and faster actually declined in 2009.
Akamai, which operates a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) that gives it a look into worldwide Internet access capabilities, said that its latest survey recorded 465 million unique IP addresses connecting to its network from 234 countries during fourth quarter — an increase of 16 percent from a year earlier.
