Akamai just released their latest "State of the Internet Report," (registration required) which every quarter covers a number of topics including broadband penetration, broadband speeds, security, and more. It's of particular interest to our readers, as the company gathers the data from clients that have hit their 56,000-strong global content server network, tracking 465 million unique IP addresses from 234 countries. The data of course provides unique data on speed specifically.

In the United States, Akamai says that the average connection is now 3.8 Mbps, which places us twenty second among all tracked countries behind countries like Latvia and the Czech Republic. Despite faster DOCSIS 3.0 and fiber deployments in some markets, that average speed dropped 0.9 percent for the quarter, and 2.5 percent for the year according to the report.

Why the slowdown? "Overall, we do not believe that this data is necessarily indicative of significant problems with the broadband infrastructure in the United States, nor do we believe that it points to insufficient availability of broadband services," explains the report. "Rather, as mentioned previously, we believe that mobile usage at sub-broadband speeds has grown to the point where it is exerting some amount of influence over the average data."

The study also tracks the fastest individual cities and states. According to Akamai, Delaware retained its position as the fastest U.S. state, with an average downstream speed of 7.6 Mbps. Alaska had the highest percentage of connections to Akamai at speeds below 256 Kbps, at 10%. On the city level, Akamai says that Berkeley, California has the fastest average connection speed at 18730 kbps, while New York has the fastest average connection speed (5139 kbps) when measured by unique IP count.

In the fourth quarter of 2009, more than one-fifth of all global connections to Akamai were at speeds faster than 5 Mbps.