Slowing U.S. Broadband: Necessary Security Tradeoff or Poor Testing?

Today I went through Akamai's Quarterly "State of the Internet Report", which compiles much of the data the company gathers while running the "world’s largest content delivery network". The report, which gains a lot of media and blogger coverage, is broken down into a few different buckets including security, performance, Internet penetration and geography. One of the most important nuggets within this most recent report, for me at least, is the fact that the United States ranks 30th worldwide in "fast" broadband speeds.

In the United States 64% of Internet connections are 2 Mbps or higher (what Akamai calls "fast") and nearly 6% are below 256 Kbps, leaving 30% somewhere in the middle of this very large range. This is actually a decrease of 9.3% from the previous report. In comparison global broadband "fast" connectivity increased by 6.8% and countries such as Tunisia, South Korea, Belgium, Japan, the UK and Germany are looking at 80% or higher getting 2 Mbps or more. The question of course is why? The report does not provide a lot of analysis on this subject since that is not Akamai's goal, but if you go back to the beginning of the document the security section may lend some evidence.

The United States is second behind China in top attack traffic originating countries and certainly would be at or near the top in destination countries. Obviously here in the United States we take network security seriously and have thrown security in front of, within and behind our network connections. Since we serve as a prominent target we have to do what it takes to keep our network infrastructure safe. Does all of this security have anything to do with the resulting degradation in bandwidth performance? Of course, but how much I'm not sure, but I would wager that it is an important element in this debate. The more important question is whether we are making a necessary trade-off for a more secure infrastructure or if this is a result of improper network equipment testing?

We have talked at length on this blog about the notion that testing security is testing performance and vice versa. When you are testing the performance of any network device, whether it be deployed for security purposes or not, you must test it with realistic traffic including live security strikes. Testing in this manner will allow you create better performing AND more secure devices. If everyone added this element of truth into their testing would we see some sort of trickle up effect in terms of opening up those bandwidth pipes? Honestly, I think so, but these are thoughts that crossed my mind this morning reading the document, what do you think? Beyond better network performance and security testing what is contributing to the decreasing percentage in the United States?

Posted by Kyle Flaherty

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