Look ma! It's all so rich and dynamic.

Akamai said it purchased Canadian web site optimization company Blaze Wednesday, ahead of its financial results call. In acquiring Blaze, content-delivery network leader Akamai offers an excellent example of how the web is changing as we access it from more devices and as the nature of the web sites we visit changes. This small deal illustrates some big changes in the web.

Blaze, which was formed in 2010, offers a service that helps web sites load faster by optimizing the scripts running on the site. It also recommends clients add a content delivery network and complements the software and CDN mix with consulting services for folks that want to go further. The optimization happens on the backend on Blaze’s servers, so the consumer’s front end experience was faster and fitted to the device he was on at the time. Other companies in this space include Aptimize.

In buying Blaze, Akamai is acknowledging that web sites today are accessed in more places, something anyone who’s been in a Starbucks lately can tell you, but also that the sites themselves are different. They use richer media and offer links back to more applications. Things like sharing something on Twitter or liking it on Facebook via a simple button add seconds to load times and complexity to the overall site. Complicated CSS scripts and lagging ad networks don’t help either.

Blaze was a natural fit for Akamai in many ways as Akamai tries to take its CDN beyond the old days of static content delivery to delivering optimized advertising, helping bring content to mobile devices, and otherwise adapt to the application-heavy and real-time nature of the web. Where web sites were once comprised of fairly simple code optimized for one or two browsers, they’re now a mash up of many applications from different places being viewed on as many as 10 different browsers and platforms. Akamai is just trying to keep up.

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Will this year be the one when turkey day beats out Cyber Monday? We will have to wait a few more hours to find out. But the loss of Cyber Monday, which got its name when most people had to go into their offices to shop online, shows how far broadband, and now mobile, have come.

Wikipedia notes that Shop.org was the first to use the term Cyber Monday back in 2005, but the phenomenon of increased web traffic had been noted by retailers a year or two prior. In 2003, only 20 percent of U.S. homes had broadband connections, a figure that stands at 68 percent today. But in the past few years, as Cyber Monday traffic has bled back into Black Friday and even the two days of the weekend, the smartphone has changed the holiday landscape even more.

So while PayPal is reporting that it’s seeing six times the traffic on Monday than it did last year, it’s the Akamai data around traffic generated on Thanksgiving that catches my eye. Much like last year, it seems consumers aren’t waiting for any industry-mandated shopping day to submit their credit cards online. Thanksgiving itself experienced 70 percent growth traffic, according to Akamai, which saw a peak traffic of about 2 million page views per minute on Thanksgiving evening, the peak so far for this shopping season.

Is it mobile or marketing?

Akamai reports that on Black Friday, it counted 1.6 page views per minute during its peak at 12 a.m. EST, and overall, Black Friday traffic was up by 43 percent. But note that when Akamai saw the peak, it was still 9 p.m. on the West Coast, which means shoppers were hopping online on Thanksgiving Day itself. Perhaps this was because they were on the couch after their meals or maybe because the promotions were too good to pass up?

Akamai saw a peak of 1.6 million page views per minute as of about 2 p.m. EST and wrote on its blog that Cyber Monday would surpass Black Friday as the peak traffic shopping day so far this season and should do so sometime Monday night. Once again, the office isn’t the place to shop online anymore. Akamai is waiting to see if Cyber Monday will beat the Thanksgiving peak.

More people, fewer problems, faster sites

No matter when people hopped online, there were more of them and the sites ran faster. Web tracking by SmartBear on Black Friday shows that retailers’ sites were about 30 percent faster as of Nov. 25 than they were throughout all the previous holiday seasons. According to data from SmartBear, which provides metrics on site performance, sites that took 20.83 seconds to load during the holiday last year took only 14.67 seconds on Black Friday itself. Target, The Gap and Toys “R” Us experienced some issues but more so on Thanksgiving as opposed to the day after.

Akamai said last year’s global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at noon EST on Black Friday, which makes this year’s peak 20 percent higher. On Cyber Monday 2010, global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at 1 p.m. EST, while this year, we’re still waiting.

This is good news for retailers who feel the pinch of lost revenue when customers can’t shop online, but it’s also good for consumers who are impatient to buy their merchandise and get on with their lives — even for those who are increasingly using mobile devices to shop while possibly doing other things. As Ryan Kim says in his article on Monday morning:

JP Morgan noted a Shop.org survey over the weekend that found almost 15 percent of respondents will shop on a smartphone or tablet on Cyber Monday, compared to 6.9 percent who did so last year. IBM Coremetrics said sales on mobile devices for Black Friday increased to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year.

So more of us are online, using mobile device as well as our PCs, while the web keeps getting faster. Looks like holiday shopping mirrors the broadband experience as a whole.

For those who care how their favorite retailer fared the onslaught, below is SmartBear’s chart on how various online merchants performed on Friday. “RT” is response time.

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The 2011 holiday season that was kicked off earlier today (Black Friday) is proving to be a big boost for m-commerce as shoppers are using their smartphones, mobile apps and other devices to go bargain hunting according to various sources. Call it the season on couch commerce.

According to IBM’s Smarter Commerce division, the number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site is 17.37 percent with almost 9.73 percent of consumers using mobile device to make a purchase. IBM points out that iPhone leads all mobile device traffic – no surprise – at 6.77 percent, followed by Android phones at 5.37 percent and iPad at 4.67 percent.

Akamai’sdata traffic trends show that while traffic on mobile websites of retailers is up nearly four times compared to last year. The increases reported by IBM and Akamai are backed by a PayPal, which says that it saw a 538 percent increase in global payment volumes compared to Black Friday 2010. In addition, PayPal saw a year-over-year 350 percent increase in the number of customers shopping through PayPal mobile.

GSI Commerce, a division of eBay that hosts commerce-related websites for several large retailers says that it saw a 345 percent increase in US mobile sales compared to last year’s Black Friday. Channel Advisor which tracks the eCommerce related businesses found that:

 ”Through the year, we saw traffic from mobile devices in the 6-7% range and on Thanksgiving it spiked up to 10%.  What’s really interesting is that Tablets (mostly the iPad) were the majority of that at 7.8% (with Smartphones at 1.2%).  It will be interesting to see if that trend inverts on BlackFriday as shoppers move from ‘Tablet couch commerce’ to shopping with their phones while they are out fighting the crowds.”

All this should not come as a surprise to anyone. Even last year it was pretty obvious that mobile was going to have a major impact on how people shopped during the holiday. We have been talking about that for a while and agreed with Google’s predictions for the mobile commerce this holiday season.

Traffic to retail websites on November 25. Source: Akamai

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“As a matter of policy, I do not comment on matters related to Yahoo as a Yahoo director. However, as a personal matter, I want to clarify that I believe Yahoo is a great company with enormous potential, but I am not — and will not be — a candidate for the CEO position. I look forward to my continued service on the Yahoo Board of Directors. The timing is coincidence; people should not draw conclusions about where I’m going next, the consumer internet is a big place. “

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Happy Cloud will leverage Akamai’s Electronic Software Delivery for Gaming solution, which was first introduced in March and was billed as a way to boost the performance of game downloads. That system, however, speeds up game downloads but doesn’t make them playable right away. By partnering together, the two companies will now be able to offer gaming companies the ability to provide on-demand gaming and an alternative to streaming services like OnLive and Gaikai.

Happy Cloud works by using a virtualized file system to pre-install a game in the cloud, eliminating the need for a user to go through an installation process. Consumers just load up Happy Cloud on their computer one time and then when they buy a game, the service begins sending the data in the order it’s needed so players can get started right away instead of waiting for the download to be completed. That allows most games, even large big-name titles, to be played within about one to six minutes, depending on the size of the game and the strength of the connection. By now integrating Happy Cloud into Akamai’s nearly 100,000 servers around the world, downloads will be boosted by as much as 35 percent, reducing the wait time to play a game to about a couple minutes in most cases. That’s a big improvement over typical game downloads, which can take several hours or more to complete.

“This gives us a leg up in distribution and scalability and allows us to have an unparalleled cloud gaming solution by using cloud infrastructure that already exists,” said Eric Gastfriend, VP and GM of Happy Cloud. Gastfriend said the companies will co-market their solution to gaming companies. Currently, Happy Cloud has about 15 games on its service now.

Kris Alexander, Chief Strategist for Connected Devices and Gaming at Akamai, said the combination is exciting because it hints at a potential larger trend for the software industry. He said software companies, not just gaming companies, could employ similar technology to speed up downloads and offer try-before-you-buy options for consumers.

“That’s where this gets interesting for larger consumer software companies,” said Alexander. “There’s no equivalent simple solution for trying software in a few minutes to decide whether to buy it.”

This makes sense in our increasingly on-demand world. People don’t want to wait and being able to provide instantly usable software of any kind could help convert wavering consumers and reduce download abandonment. It might be more limited to larger software that traditionally takes longer to download or install. And with more cloud computing on the way, solutions like this may have less appeal over time. But Happy Cloud and now Akamai are showing that the cloud can be tapped intelligently to deliver software.

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The state of web content today

As richer, more dynamic, more interactive sites have hit the Web; the existing infrastructure has become insufficient. While high-speed broadband has tried to meet the infrastructure demands of the exploding volume and size of content on the Web, it’s clear that throwing pure infrastructure at the problem isn’t enough.

Two new markets emerged from these challenges: the content delivery network market (CDN) and the application delivery controller market (ADC). Put simply: These are technologies that help make your experience on the web a lot faster, while still using the same infrastructure that has been in place for the past two decades.

Remarkably, those two markets are now struggling to keep up with the explosive growth of the web. Sites are too big, too dynamic, and too rich for our existing infrastructure, and prevailing techniques for optimizing performance.

Today, we’re embarking upon the third major evolution in modern web performance. Web content optimization and acceleration is one of the largest market opportunities in the tech sector today, and it’s going to pave the way for the next major era of the Internet. Without it, innovation gets throttled.

The technologies we’re currently using to speed up the web need to be supercharged. They need extra help. That’s where making sure web content is efficiently delivered comes in. It’s about the conservation of bandwidth and the compression of megabytes, especially on mobile networks.

Four problems you can’t ignore

Most of the web performance challenges we face today can be traced to four basic trends:

1. Third-party content. Any given web site incorporates vast amounts of third-party content. This includes content such as advertisements, widgets and syndicated feeds.
2. Dynamic. Sites are now required to be more dynamic than our infrastructure can handle. Twitter feeds are constantly changing, and the data can’t be cached, and furthermore, we expect a high degree of personalization and individually relevant experiences when we visit sites.
3. More, more, more. We’re experiencing a content explosion: Sites have more pages, more pictures and more videos packed into the pages than ever before.
4. New devices. Myriad new devices hit the market every month, all of which are Internet-enabled. This doesn’t just mean more laptops and iPads; we’re also talking about refrigerators, low-cost home security cameras, and even cars!

And why is this happening? There’s a new party in town, and its called social media. Our problems aren’t capacity problems; it’s just that our content delivery infrastructure wasn’t designed for what’s happening. The existing infrastructure is designed on three premises and assumptions:

1. Single origin. Most content will originate from the same web servers, so if these are working properly, then everything is good.
2. Static content. Most information will stay the same, and therefore can be cached across the data center and Internet.
3. Fast delivery. Because content comes from a single origin and doesn’t change, caching and route optimization can deliver everything quickly.

Social media turns these assumptions on their heads. Content is mashed-up, syndicated, streamed from everywhere — with different qualities of service. So even if you’re paying $500,000 for traditional performance solutions, your pages will still slow down to the lowest common denominator, such as a slow ad service or the slower speeds of a streamed page from Facebook.

Yes, we can build new infrastructure, but it will take too long, and it may not be enough. We can throw more of the same performance technology at it, but this only helps so much, and the traditional technology doesn’t do anything for today’s dynamic content, which can’t be cached. At the end of the day, these four factors have driven intense demand for a new type of web acceleration.

With our powers combined, we are …

The good news is that we have the technology to solve the problem, and there has already been a good deal of investment to put the wheels in motion. We’re seeing the many web performance players converge to do this.

Recently, Limelight Networks acquired AcceloWeb for up to a rumored $20 million in a cash and stock deal. AcceloWeb’s technology does precisely what I’ve hinted at so far: It accelerates web content so that it can travel faster over our existing Internet infrastructure. Limelight, a traditional CDN company, is making a large investment in Web content optimization and acceleration. These are two fundamentally different markets converging under one company, yet we hardly heard any talk about the strategy behind the investment.

Similarly, Google recently announced that Google Analytics now offers a Site Speed Analytics Report. It was greeted with applause from the web performance community, but nobody really heard about how this “feature” had much broader implications for the web.

Google isn’t just helping you measure your site’s speed; they want the Web to be lightning fast. It’s critical to the future of their business that the web isn’t crippled by performance woes.

Their revenue is still largely ad-based, which contribute costly seconds to load times if we don’t find a solution. Not to mention: The faster a site loads, the more ads Google can serve. Google cares about web performance because it’s absolutely critical to their business and the future of the web itself.

Just how big is this?

This isn’t just the market opportunity for web content acceleration that’s exciting here. What’s more important is the future of the web, and what this evolution in web performance will spawn.

We’re talking about webscale personalization that isn’t held back by performance problems. Personalization is the web topic du jour, but we’re not going to reach the promise of true web personalization if we can’t load web pages faster than we’re doing on average today.

Similarly, the mobile web is going to face major obstacles if we can’t tune our apps to perform on even the most troubled networks. And we sure as heck aren’t going to usher in the future of virtual personal assistants if we can’t conduct complex processing and deliver that content at the speeds that consumers demand.

Oddly enough, the success or failure of these sexy technologies hinges on a critical evolution in web performance. All of a sudden, the emerging web acceleration and content optimization market is starting to look a lot sexier to investors, entrepreneurs and incumbent technology companies alike.

Ed Robinson is the CEO of Aptimize, a company that produces software to accelerate websites.

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Akamai, the Cambridge, Mass.-based content distribution company has been monitoring the traffic to various retail sites, and so far they are seeing strong growth. According to the data collected by the CDN, today at 11.30 AM (eastern) retail sites were generating about 1.338 million page views per minute on a global basis. In North America alone, the retail websites were generating 1.1095 million page views per minute at 1 PM (eastern.) These are today’s traffic highs, according to Akamai, which tracks about 270 global retail/e-commerce websites.

So far, there haven’t been any major glitches reported on Black Friday, Gomez Advisors, a web performance measurement company, noted in an email to us. According to Gomez, it is because traditional websites have been ready for the season by ramping up their infrastructure, and they are not making any massive site changes during this critical period. In addition, Gomez notes that people will be turning to mobile devices for their shopping this year, even though the mobile web experience isn’t comparable to the PC experience. So far, Gomez found that shoppers seem to be pretty happy with their online retail experience.

This year is looking better than last at the start of the shopping season. According to comScore, U.S. online sales during first 21 days of November were $9.01 billion versus $7.95 billion during the first 21 days of 2009. The Chase Paymentech’s Pulse Index, which measures same-store growth at 50 major online retailers, has seen a 21 percent year-over-year growth through November 22, 2010. The total numbers of transactions were up 36 percent during the first twenty days of November alone. According to J.P. Morgan, the first 20 days of November 2009 represented 25 percent of 2009 total holiday season sales.

I will update these numbers and other relevant data over the weekend, as I gather more information.

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In 1999, it was the rapid growth of wired web services that was the top story. Fast-forward to today, and it’s the massive and seemingly unstoppable growth of the mobile Internet that’s all the rage. The demand for mobile Internet (and its subset, mobile web) is upending all expectations and predictions. Between Apple and Google, about 500,000 new portable Internet devices are getting connected to the Internet.

Planet Mobile

In its State of the Internet Report for the second quarter of 2010, Cambridge, Mass.-based content distribution network Akamai notes there are 19 mobile carriers around the world offering connections with average real world speeds of over 6.1 Mbps, while 29 carriers have an average speeds of 1 Mbps.

Here are some interesting tidbits about mobile from the report, which is likely to be released tomorrow:

• Five providers in Canada, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, Germany, and Austria have users, who on average, consumed more than one gigabyte (1 GB) of content from Akamai per month during the second quarter. Speeds of these services vary, but the higher the speeds, higher the data consumption.
• An additional 80 mobile providers around the world had more than 100 MB of data downloaded from Akamai per unique IP address per month during the second quarter of 2010.
• A wireless carrier from United Kingdom was fastest in terms of peak average speeds during the quarter – 36.6 Mbps. A Slovakian carrier came in second with 20.20 Mbps, and a Russian mobile phone company clocked about 19 Mbps on their wireless networks. Russia was one of the first countries to launch WiMAX and LTE-based networks.
• In the U.S., the top peak speed was about 3 Mbps and top average speed was 0.98 mbps.

Speeding It Up

On the wired Internet side, the continuous deployment of fiber-based broadband networks and new DOCSIS 3.0-based cable broadband networks is causing a sharp increase in broadband speeds in some parts of the world.  According to Akamai data, the average connection speed on a global basis was around 1.8 Mbps; up 6.1 percent from the second quarter of 2009, and up 3.8 percent from the second quarter of 2010. Here are some key observations about global broadband trends:

• South Korea is the fastest country in the world with 17 Mbps as an average broadband speed, up 47 percent form second quarter of 2009. Hong Kong was second with 8.6 Mbps, while Japan came in at 8.0 Mbps.
• The peak connection in South Korea was 38 Mbps versus 16 Mbps peak connection speeds in the U.S.
• The United States had an average speed of 4.6 Mbps, up 1.8 percent from the second quarter of 2009 but down 1.8 percent from the first quarter of 2010.

Fastest Cities in The World

• Masan, South Korea is still the fastest city in the world, and it did so by boosting its average speed to over 20 Mbps during the second quarter of 2010.
• There are 20 cities across the planet which have average speeds in excess of 10 Mbps.
• Asia dominates the top 100 cities list with 62 cities in Japan, 12 in South Korea and Hong Kong.
• Europe accounted for 15 cities across eight countries, with Romania ranking highest with five cities in the top 100.
• North America accounted for the final ten, with two in Canada and the remaining eight in the U.S. San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York are not on the list.

The American Broadband Story

• The average broadband speed in the U.S. was around 4.6 Mbps, with Monterey Park, Calif. having the top average broadband speed of around 6.9 Mbps.
• The peak speeds in the U.S. on an average were around 16 Mbps during second quarter 2010.
• Delaware is inching toward nearly 100 percent broadband adoption mark.
• Six other U.S. states have broadband adoption of 80 percent or higher.
• The biggest growth was seen in West Virginia and Rhode Island, gaining 11 percent and 10 percent adoption respectively.
• The biggest losses were seen in Iowa and Arizona, which declined 11 percent and 10 percent respectively.
• Year-over-year changes were more significant, with 11 states posting double-digit increases, led by Alaska’s yearly growth of 44 percent.

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I know this is a battle of various reporters claiming their sources are right, but if my reporting is correct you’ll actually be able to see it for yourself. Akamai displays a real-time visualization of its active streams, and breaks out live streams specifically. I’m expecting we’ll see a significant bump from the current total global live streams powered by Akamai — currently a bit under 600,000 — right at 10 a.m. PT.

A source familiar with Apple’s streaming plans said that not only is the North Carolina data center not yet online, but one single facility could likely not handle such an event; large, distributed global audiences are exactly what CDNs are built for. (As a side note, apparently one of Apple’s major concerns about executing the stream was the level of demand coming from its own employees watching from the network at its Cupertino headquarters.)

Though Apple isn’t geoblocking the stream, it is limited only to Apple devices. That’s because Apple has yet to port its HTTP streaming technology to QuickTime for Windows. The company considered using traditional RTSP streaming for Windows users, but according to the source, decided the quality wouldn’t be sufficient. I suppose they could have also enlisted Microsoft’s Silverlight HTTP streaming, but considering it’s Apple, that was probably out of the question.

This is Apple’s first live video feed of an announcement in a long time; Macworld keynotes used to be streamed, but for the last five years fans have had to rely on live-blogging from reporters attending the closed-door events.

Apple’s HTTP streaming is an adaptive bitrate technology, meaning it can detect a watcher’s bandwidth and CPU capabilities in real time and then adjust the quality of a video stream. This requires encoding a single video at multiple bitrates and switching to the most appropriate one on a moment-by-moment basis (something companies like Inlet Technologies have pioneered). The result is very little buffering, fast start time and a good experience for both high-end and low-end connections.

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Akamai, in the fourth quarter of last year first measured the city speeds but came up with a list that was heavily skewed in favor of academic cities, mostly because university networks are uber-fast. This time around, Akamai has applied an “Academic Network” filter in addition to its metric of “a minimum of 50,000 unique IP addresses that connect to Akamai network.” As a result, the three top-ranked cities from the fourth quarter – Berkeley, Calif., Chapel Hill, N.C., and Stanford, Calif. – are now out of the top 100 list.  After discounting college towns, Masan, South Korea is the fastest city in the world, according to the data collected by Akamai. Here are some relevant stats about the top 100 fastest Internet cities.

* Asia dominates the top 100 list with 59 cities.

* Japan accounts for 30 cities in the list.

* The U.S. has 12 cities in the list, with seven located in California.

* Umeå, Sweden is the fastest city in Europe, and is ranked No. 18 out of 100.

Akamai is likely to release its first quarter 2010 State of the Internet report tomorrow and the report is going to feature a new metric: global average maximum connection speeds. This is a metric that measures the end-user connections. According to this metric:

* South Korea has a average maximum connection speed of 33 Mbps.

* South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan are the top three countries by speed in the list.

* US was eight amongst the top ten countries – with average maximum speed of 16 Mbps.

* European countries make up six of the top ten fastest countries, with each country averaging a maximum speed of 15 Mbps. These include Romania (#4), Sweden (#5), Latvia (#6), Belgium (#7), Portugal (#9) and Bulgaria (#10.)

On the mobile end of things, Akamai measured wireless carriers and their average maximum speeds.

* Eighty-three of the 109 total mobile providers have an average maximum connection speed of over 2 Mbps.

* Thirty-three networks had maximum measured speeds higher than 5 Mbps.

* Six networks had maximum speeds of greater than 10 Mbps.

Here are some other interesting Internet facts from the forthcoming report:

* There are over 487 million unique IP addresses that connect to Akamai network from 233 countries and regions.

* The number of IP addresses grew 7.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010 when compared to the fourth quarter of 2009. The year-over-year growth in IP addresses is about 30 percent.

* The U.S. and China account for about 40 percent of the total IP addresses.

In the U.S., the overall average connection speed was 4.7 Mbps, with 22 states exceeding that average. Delaware is still the fastest state in the Union, while Alaska is the slowest.

A week of World Cup mania has passed and the traffic online and at sites like Twitter have reached some impressive highs. In Twitter’s case, the network hit a record during the Japan-Cameroon game on June 14 of 2,940 tweets per second, only to be surpassed last night at the end of the Lakers/Celtics basketball championship game, which averaged 3,085 tweets per second. On a normal day, that number stands closer to 750.

Many of those who were tweeting up a storm about the vuvuzelas and the bad calls by referees may have been at work: Cisco’s ScanSafe SaaS Web security service notes that corporate web traffic was up 27 percent globally during World Cup matches taking place during working hours. The Cisco note goes on to say that malware tied to the World Cup is on the rise as well (both hackers and bloggers are all aware of the key word effect, apparently), although that could just be a pitch for the company’s security software.

Cisco calculated that on June 11, the day the games began, of the roughly 80.6 billion spam messages that were sent, 257 million of those sent each hour were related to the World Cup. That led Cisco to estimate that more than 3 billion such messages were sent — or 4 percent of all global spam.

In other data points, Akamai’s continued look at the World Cup’s effect on overall Internet traffic continues at its specialty site. The content-delivery network, which beefed up its infrastructure leading into the tournament in expectation of record traffic, said that on average, World Cup-related traffic has been driving close to 1Terabit/second of traffic. And that’s on top of the content Akamai already delivers. AlertSite, a website performance measurement company, also noted that site load times for major portals, news providers and live streaming sites slowed down during gameplay.

A Bigger Internet

During the last three months of 2009, nearly 4.7 percent more unique IP addresses were connecting to Akamai’s network. At the end of 2009, there were about 465 million IP addresses from 234 countries vs. 401 million at the end of 2008 and 312 million at the end of 2007. The U.S. and China account for nearly 40 percent of the total 465 million unique IP addresses. What that tells us is that more people around the world are using the Internet.

Planet Mobile

The rapid growth in the number of unique IP addresses is going to decline mostly because of the law of large numbers. In addition, many service providers, including mobile carriers, are using network address translation (NAT) and proxy/gateway technology to cope with the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. I bet that as we start to see more and more “connected” devices there will be a burst in the number of unique IP addresses. Ericsson recently forecast there would be 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

Akamai studied 109 mobile providers and found more than 40 of them to have average measured connection speeds of over 1 Mbps in the fourth quarter, while 11 had broadband-level connectivity, which Akamai defines as speeds of 2 Mbps or greater. Austria currently is home to the fastest mobile broadband provider — 3.2 Mbps — while the Russian Federation is fractionally lower, followed by Italy and Poland.

Interestingly, in the U.S. it seems Clearwire (Sprint) is doing a great job of holding the mantle of wireless broadband leader. According to Akamai, “[D]ata for a leading WIMAX network provider in the United States – at an average measured connection speed of approximately 1.8 Mbps, they place within the top 20 mobile providers globally. This provider showed a quarterly speed gain of 11.5%, and a yearly gain of 5%.”

Faster Faster Broadband

Ironically, the growing popularity of mobile phones is bringing down average global connection speeds, despite substantial network and speed upgrades in many countries. Case in point is South Korea, where the launch of Apple’s iPhone in November 2009 was so successful that it brought down the average connectivity speed by 24 percent. Now remember, this is South Korea — home to some of the fastest broadband connections anywhere in the planet.

“As the average observed connection speed for this mobile provider was a fraction of that observed from wireline connections in South Korea, we believe that this launch was likely responsible for the significant drop in South Korea’s average observed connection speed in the fourth quarter,” the Akamai report notes.

That said, the Internet got a lot faster. Even though the total broadband connections to Akamai’s network grew only 1.6 percent, now nearly one-fifth of the connections to the network had speeds of 5 Mbps or more, up 6 percent in the third quarter of 2009. In the U.S., nearly 25 percent of connections are now 5 Mbps. For further details, check out the chart, which breaks down the top markets and speed shares.

I think it’s most interesting to see the share in ultra-broadband: 25 Mbps or more. The rollout of FTTx/DOCSIS 3.0 technology-based networks is only going to increase, and that will have a long-term implication for all types of web services and service providers. Tiny countries like Switzerland, Monaco, Slovakia and Croatia are seeing massive broadband adoption.

Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network, today said that at peak it was sending 3.45 terabits per second of data on Friday. This is the highest amount of data it’s ever sent over the Akamai network. The traffic peak of 3.45 Tbps is roughly equivalent to the capacity needed to download the entire printed contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in less than a minute.

That’s not all. The Akamai network hit a brand-new peak for video streaming on Friday — thanks in large part to a big surge in demand for professional golf and baseball video streams. Over the course of the day, Akamai logged more than 500 billion requests for content, a sum equal to serving content to every human once every 20 minutes.

At peak, Akamai supported more than 12 million requests per second –- a rate roughly equivalent to serving content to the entire population of the U.S. every 30 seconds, the company said.

“This new peak demand demonstrates the Internet’s emergence as a primary channel for communications, entertainment, and commerce,” Paul Sagan, Akamai’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

I had previously noted that NBCOlympics.com clocked 710 million page views and 46 million unique visits. In addition, NBC Olympics Mobile served up 82 million page views and 1.9 million mobile video streams. But those numbers were a small part of the overall picture.

* Akamai delivered more than 5,000 hours of live and on-demand video over 17 days and at peak, served more than 30 concurrent live-streaming events.
* At its peak, Akamai was streaming close to 374 Gbps of video.
* The company delivered more than 12 Petabytes  (12,000 TBs) across its Olympics customers. To put that in perspective, the Internet archive has over 3 petabytes of data.
* On Feb. 28, at its peak, Akamai served up about 2.4 million pages per second, with the majority of traffic coming from North America, followed by Europe. This could be explained by the USA v. Canada ice hockey finals and the closing ceremony.
* Other continents had a passing interest in the events of the day.

These numbers are for the content delivered by Akamai on behalf of a dozen of its customers and not the entire Akamai network.

For more data and information on Olympics, follow our sister blog NewTeeVee’s Olympics coverage. They have covered the event extensively including all the problems with the event and frustration among the actual users.

NBC clearly skimped on the online coverage, much to annoyance of the consumers.

Cloud providers understand that latency breeds contempt, so they turn to CDNs to get a boost. Rackspace and Limelight are close partners, GoGrid just teamed with EdgeCast, and Amazon Web Services provides its own CloudFront service. The result won’t be improved application performance or faster database calls, but videos and files will load far faster than they would if they were delivered from a centralized data center.

However, it’s not just cloud providers that are taking advantage of their Internet-delivery cohorts. CDN leader Akamai, especially, has inserted itself smack into the middle of the cloud computing ecosystem, to the benefit of the SaaS market. Through a partnership with SaaS-platform provider OpSource, for example, Akamai’s route-optimization technology speeds the delivery of web applications across the Internet, giving customers a more real-time experience. Akamai even fancies itself a cloud provider by letting customers deploy Java applications across its collection of 50,000 servers, an offering it calls EdgeComputing.

The SaaS connection actually seems like something that all CDN and cloud providers should be looking to exploit. As the report notes, CDNs are struggling to make video delivery a profitable business, and while SaaS is profitable, cloud providers are still trying to convince users to move important applications into the troposphere. Clouds give CDNs something to deliver, and CDNs give clouds confidence-inspiring delivery. And they might want to get busy, as telcos seem well positioned to capitalize on this synergy unilaterally should they get proactive.

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According to subsequent data, the answer appears to be “yes.” Traffic to retail sites hit a peak of 7.38 million visitors per minute late afternoon Eastern time on Sunday, according to Akamai, a few million above the Black Friday peak of of 6.69 million visitors per minute. Data today will show how the weekend and Black Friday stacked up against the Cyber Monday rush, but as of 10 a.m. ET it was hovering at just above 6 million visitors per minute. I’ll update later today, of course. Update: Cyber Monday held on with 7,909,317 visitors per minute to retail sites as measured by Akamai this afternoon around 3 pm ET.

While retailers can get people to hit the web by using Cyber Monday discounts provided online, I know I’ve already scored some sweet deals and am pretty much tapped out when it comes to gifts I can purchase online. I may not be the only one, according to a research note issued today by Colin Sebastian, VP and senior analyst of digital media and the Internet at Lazard Capital Markets:

While Cyber Monday may be the ceremonial kick-off to holiday spending, we note that some sales were likely pulled forward due to more aggressive Thanksgiving/Black Friday promotions by both pure-play and multi-channel sites.

Overall, Black Friday sales rose half a percent in brick-and-mortar stores, to $10.066 billion, according to ShopperTrak, which tracks retail sales, and were up 11 percent to $913 million online, according to comScore. That’s better than expected online, but no word on how deep discounting affected sales.  However, big winners appear to be eBay’s PayPal unit, which saw a 25 percent year-over-year increase in payment volume on Thanksgiving Day and a 20 percent rise on Black Friday. Mobile online payments through PayPal were 140 percent higher than an average Friday.

And Amazon seems to have taken the crown for most-visited web site on Black Friday, attracting 13.55 percent of online shoppers, according to Experian Hitwise data. However, the book seller also released data today showing that its Kindle e-Reader saw record sales in November as folks shopped for the holidays. The question for Amazon and other online retailers is: Will they continue to hit new highs or has the peak passed? Even if we’ve hit the peak, continued high traffic (and hopefully sales volume) may mean the peaks are ultimately less important, which will turn Black Friday and Cyber Monday into anachronisms online.

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