According to its press release, Akamai Technologies, Inc., the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, announced the release of the second edition of its quarterly "State of the Internet" report. Akamai's quarterly report provides insight into key Internet statistics such as origin of attack traffic, network outages and broadband connectivity levels across the globe.

During the months of April, May, and June of 2008, over 346 million unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai global server network - five percent more than during the first three months of the year. Extrapolating data gathered across Akamai's network, the "State of the Internet" report analyzes the origins of attack traffic, network outages and de-peering events, as well as provides a look at broadband connectivity by geography.

Findings from the 25 page report include a closer look at the trend of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to continue to target exploits that were identified years ago, suggesting there is still a significant population of insufficiently patched systems connected to the Internet.

From a protocol perspective, the report highlights that the second quarter of 2008 saw increased DNS resolution capacity, steps towards additional generic top-level domains, and a key IPv6 deadline for the U.S. federal government.

In addition, Akamai's unique level of visibility into the connection speeds of systems issuing requests to the Akamai network has created a one-of-a-kind view into broadband adoption around the globe. Leveraging that data, Akamai's quarterly "State of the Internet" report identifies both the countries and U.S. states with the fastest and slowest average connection speeds exhibited by IP addresses originating from those respective geographies.
You can read or download the report, and can access the archive of last quarter's report.