South India is slowing in net usage and speeds

India’s tech savvy southern states seem to be losing out to the north with internet usage and broadband adoption dropping drastically during Q2 of 2009, if key internet statistics collated by online technologies giant Akamai Technologies is anything to go by.

According to the latest State of the Internet Report put out by Akamai, India ranked 20th globally for number of unique Internet protocol (IP) addresses registering an 8% growth with over three million IPs. Delhi and Maharashtra topped the list with over 1 million unique IPs each with a growth of 11% and 13%, respectively.

However, Tamil Nadu saw a 6% drop in IP numbers while Karnataka remained static with 0% growth and Andhra Pradesh and Kerala saw just a 1% increase. West Bengal showed the largest slip of 15% followed by Chandigarh at 9%.

Likewise, the south also seems to have slowed down where Internet speeds are also concerned. Karnataka showed a 13% drop in net speeds quarter-on-quarter followed by Tamil Nadu with a drop of 10%. Jammu & Kashmir showed the biggest drop at 19%. Orissa however showed a massive jump of 66% in internet speed.

Though Karnataka slowed down it was still the second fastest state with an average speed of 1100 kbps, followed by Kerala at 1086 kbps.

The quarterly Akamai report on server traffic, connection speeds, Internet penetration and broadband adoption across the world is based on movement on its own networks and aggregated from publicly available statistics through out the quarter.  India ranked 107 globally for average connection speeds at 895 kbps.

A dubious distinction that India gained during the quarter is the global number 4 ranking in attack traffic with 3.9% of all such traffic originating in the country. However, the US and China continued to retain their top ranking for as the two largest sources of attack traffic accounting for 45% of it.

Also during the second quarter, 125 countries had average connection speeds below 1 Mbps, up slightly from 120 countries in the prior quarter.

In the second quarter of 2009, 19% of the Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps.

This represents a 5% decline from the prior quarter (bringing it back to the level seen in the fourth quarter of 2008), and only a 0.2% year-over-year increase.