The fastest country in the world in terms of the Internet is South Korea, with an average broadband speed of 14.6 Mbps.

South Korea was followed by Japan, (7.9 Mbps), Hong Kong, Romania, Sweden and Ireland, according to the latest quarterly State of the Internet report issued by Akamai. The report covers the third quarter 2009.

By comparison the US had an average connection speed of 3.9 Mbps. Akamai reports on actual speeds as measured through the company's global server network. I sent a query off to the company about speeds for Bermuda and they replied: "For Q3 2009, Bermuda had an average observed connection speed of 1.5 Mbps, down 4.9 percent from Q2 2009, but up 2.5 percent from Q3 2008."

TeleBermuda International and Cable & Wireless both started offering 6 Mbps service recently, but of course there is always a difference between the maximum speed offered by a service and the actual speed achieved on a given day. This difference is due to a number of factors, including the load on the network. The number provided for any given service is the maximum speed you can achieve if all was perfect.

As the Computer Society of Bermuda recommends, test your Internet speed at www.speedtest.net After you have done a speed test, try doing a ping test at www.pingtest.net This determines the quality of your broadband Internet connection. As the site explains, streaming media, voice, video communications, and online gaming require more than just raw speed. A ping test determines the delay between your computer and servers in the network. It is a test of reliability and quality.

If you do these tests, let me know what you achieved. Please also send me what service speed you are paying for and when you made the test. My email is at the bottom of this article. It would be interesting to see the differences. I will publish the figures anonymously if I receive enough of them.

Like storage, you can never have enough speed. With high-definition video becoming more prevalent over time and increasing consumption of data over the Internet, speed is becoming more important. To give you an idea of what is needed, a connection speed of 2 Mbps is considered sufficient for standard definition TV-quality video content. A speed of 5 Mbps is good enough for standard-definition DVD quality video. Basically, the faster your speed, the less time you spend waiting for data to download.

Mobile connectivity is also becoming more important. For the first time Akamai has included figures metrics related to connections to Akamai identified as coming from networks associated with mobile providers.

The company's initial observations show that the average connection speeds across the three US mobile carriers approached or exceeded 700 Kbps. There was significant variability in the connection speeds throughout the year, Akamai said, but it appears that all three are converging on average speeds in the 700-800 Kbps range.

In terms of sources of Internet attacks, Akamai observed traffic originating from 207 unique countries. The main sources of attacks (viruses, hacks, etc), came from Russia and Brazil. In the previous quarter the US and China were the two largest attack traffic sources.

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One must commend Google and satellite imagery company GeoEye (www.geoeye.com) for the quick response in providing images for the rescue teams working in Haiti. Google is a game changer in the global emergency response network.

The images were taken a day after the earthquake, which occurred on 12 January, as a means of surveying and assessing the damage to Haiti's infrastructure. One can download what's called a KML file and open it in Google Earth or download the very hi-definition images at GeoEye to view on your computer. The hi-def files are meant for aid workers.

When you look at the images on Google Earth (after downloading the KML file) your first response will be surprise that everything generally looks intact. You might say: "Oh it's not as bad as I thought." That is because you are viewing the rooftops. As an expert commented, the rooftops may look intact, but what's below them is not.

While there is a strong business case for both companies to provide the images, it is not a one off exercise for Google, whose informal motto after all is 'Don't be evil'. Since 2007, Google's satellite imagery has been used by emergency and aid teams in the Sudan to document refugee quarters in the camps. Google Earth also worked with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative to allow people to track the conflict in the Darfur region.

This allows Internet users to zoom in and see satellite images of the burnt-out villages and mosques and schools. The aim is to draw attention to threats of genocide around the world. By highlighting the images, the partnership aims to lift the cloud of denial and deception that governments use to cover up genocide.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmedgmail.com