Monday ramblings

I've got plans for a couple of more substantive posts, but until those materialize, I may content myself with sporadic and short, quasi-Tweet output.

If you're a European interested in broadband, and you want to depress yourself beyond what you might normally expect from a Monday in January, then check out the latest update to the reliably humbling Akamai State of the Internet Report, just out today (registration required). If you consult the ranking of the world's 100 fastest cities by average connection speed on page 12, you'll see that you have to read down to number 48 before finding a non-Asian name, and even then it's a Romanian city. (I'm curious to see Hong Kong listed as number 46, with an average speed of 8.9Mbps. Given that fiber purist City Telecom has c.25% of the broadband market, and fiber offerings from competitors in the market are of similar scale (combined), this seems to imply that the DSL and cable customers in the market are getting pretty dismal throughput.) Also of interest will be the mobile statistics on pages 28 - 29, particularly the observation that just over one-third of mobile networks monitored saw content consumption double YoY in Q3 2010.