Giving a clear indication of poor broadband penetration in the country, India has been ranked 115th among 223 countries in terms of average internet connection speeds.

This State of the Internet report is in the latest quarterly study by Akamai Technologies, the US-based internet content distribution giant.

India, says the report, has an average internet connection speed of just 772 Kbps compared with the global average of 1.5 Mbps.

And, at the end of 2008, approximately 19 per cent internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps -- a 21 per cent increase over the average global connection speed at the end of 2007. In line with their average connection speed of 15 Mbps, and their appearance at the top of the list for the prior three quarters, South Korea once again ranked as the country with the highest percentage of connections on high broadband (greater than 5 Mbps).

India ranks 93rd globally for broadband adoption (with 3.74 per cent connections at speeds over 2 Mbps) and is positioned at 55th globally for narrowband adoption (with 25.8 per cent of connections at speeds below 256 Kbps).

South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway had more high broadband IPs per capita than in the prior quarter studied. This is consistent with what would be expected from the initiatives to bring higher-speed connectivity, including fibre-to-the-home efforts, to consumers in these countries, notes the Akamai report.

The report, however, also shows India to be progressing in these matters. "The average connection speed will be an interesting number to track in the coming quarters and gives us a clear indication of the growing broadband adoption in the country," said Sanjay Singh, managing director -- India, for Akamai.

He added, "We continue to see strong trends that point to ever-improving internet penetration figures in India, with observed unique IPs growing 43 per cent year-on-year and average connection speed well above 750 Kbps."

The report also notes that the number of unique IPs or internet addresses from India grew 42.91 per cent year-on-year, to 2.63 million. Globally, the number of unique IPs grew 20 per cent. In terms of broadband penetration, India had 0.0001 broadband IPs per capita.

India ranked 17th globally on another parameter called attack traffic -- a measure of rogue activity on the Internet, such as DNS attacks, bots, spam activity and hackers.

During the fourth quarter of 2008, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 193 countries around the world -- up nearly 8 per cent from the third quarter count of 179 countries.

In the fourth quarter, the US moved into first place for the first time in 2008, after placing second to either China or Japan through the year. Through 2008, the US, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan were consistently among the top 10 countries that generated the highest percentages of attack traffic.