Internet Browsers compared to Movie celebrities

In our quest to ensure that PitStopTech readers get a wide variety of information pertaining to technology and education, we’re sharing with you today this very important visual that discusses web browsers. We know that we have loyal Apple vs. PC users out there, some of whom are attached at the hip to Firefox, Chrome, or some version of IE.  So rather than trying to convince you that my browser choice is better than your browser choice, I present to you without further ado, a look at who your favorite browser would be if it were a celebrity. This might just make you laugh

Browsers As Celebrity

• Firefox= Morgan Freeman
• Chrome = Christopher Nolan
• IE6 = Betty White
• IE7 = Matthew McConaughey
• IE8= The Shatner
• Safari = Samuel L. Jackson
• Flock = Michael Cera
• Netscape = Walter Matthau
• Opera = J-Lo
• IceWeasel = Kristen Schaal
• Requires No Browser = Keanu Reeves

VIA EDUDEMIC

India's internet speed crawling, avg speeds rise from 1mbps to 1.3mbps. Ranked 114 in netspeed

It finally looks like India is waking up to the state of the Internet across the world as a report has revealed that the country’s average Internet speed rose by more than 20 percent to 1.3Mbps in the previous quarter of 2013.

A report by cloud-computing firm Akamai Technologies has revealed that India had an average speed of only 1Mbps in the first quarter of 2012, and has since seen a rise of 0.3Mbps over the past year. The firm believes that the country could see a jump of over 40 percent in the next year.

"Based on current industry growth trends, we expect a 40 per cent to 50 per cent increase in connection speed over the next 12 months. This translates to anything between 1.7 to 1.8 Mbps,"said Bruno Goveas, Akamai Technologies Director of Products for Asia Pacific and Japan.

While the jump may seem like a big one to many, the picture isn’t too rosy when compared to the situation abroad. India is still lagging behind 113 countries in the world as far as Internet connections’ speed goes. The world over, 46 percent of Internet users get a speed of 4Mbps and up while 13 percent have an Internet connection that gives speed of 10Mpbs and up. In India, only 2.4 percent of Internet users get more than 4Mbps speed, up by 33 percent quarter-on-quarter and 66 percent year-on-year. Barely 0.4 percent users have connections that are faster than 10Mbps, up by 102 percent quarter-on-quarter and 85 percent year-on-year.

South Korea still ranks number one in the world with an average connection speed of 14.2Mbps while Honk Kong ranks first as far as peak connection speeds go with 63.6Mbps. Switzerland is in top position as far as adoption rates go, with 88 percent of users in the country getting speeds of 4Mbps and more and South Korea came out tops as far as adoption of high speed broadband goes, with 50 percent users enjoying speeds of 10Mbps and more.

According to Akamai, there are 16.28 million unique IP addresses in India this quarter, up from 13.3 percent from 14.3 million IPv4 addresses in the previous quarter. Globally, there are 733.8 million IPv4 addresses, a quarter-on-quarter leap of 3.1 percent and year-upon-year leap of 10 percent.

Goveas mentioned that connection speeds to the last mile (at home) have increased thanks to investments made by telecom companies, cable operators and service providers towards laying high-speed fiber cables to homes that ensure consumers get higher connection data speed. This holds true especially in urban areas. "Many users now get online via mobile phones. High speed data plans are very affordable with some innovative data plan offerings from service providers. Hence, we expect to see a rise is high speed connections," he said.

Akamai has also said it expects that Tier II and Tier III cities will show growths in the coming months thanks to investments by telcos and access to Internet from mobile phones.

ndia has come a long way in terms of technology, but Internet speed something that has downer in the country. You hear about it everyday, people saying that the Internet is too slow. Reportedly the internet speed in India is ranked below the average internet speed amongst the countries of the world. Sometimes the speed is actually so bad that it feels like the connection is out. Reportedly, corporates are working on improving the speeds further the next year or so. "We expect growth in speeds from users in Tier II and Tier III cities as well, and not just Tier I, given the investments from telecom companies , and with users accessing the Internet from mobile phones," says Goveas.

Internet connections with speed greater than 4Mbps in India accounted for 2.4% of the total connections in the country. However, this represents a 33% and 66% increase over the past quarter and year, respectively.

The number of internet connections with speed higher than 10Mbps, called high broadband by Akamai, has increased by an astounding 102% over the first quarter of the year. However, such connections only account for 0.3% of the total internet connections in India.

Worldwide, 46% and 13% internet users have connections with speeds higher than 4Mbps and 10Mbps, respectively.

As an optimist and technology enthusiast, I like stories that talk about improved Internet connectivity in India. Going into this information age, having a strong infrastructure is essential for India. Unfortunately, despite some of the promising announcements coming like the government of India investing several Billion dollars, Akamai says Internet in India sucks compared to rest of the world.

Back in March of this year, a press release from Akamai India gave us some insight regarding Internet speeds in India and the latest edition of Akamai's quarterly State of the Internet report, puts in perspective India's Internet connectivity with the rest of the world. Here are the stats and numbers from Akamai:

·         21.8Mbps—Highest (average) connection speed available in Taegu South Korea

·         114—India's rank for average connection speeds globally

·         0.9Mbps—average Internet speed in India (South Korea has the best at 17.5Mbps, and the global average is 2.3Mbps)

·         27%—Internet connections in India below 256Kbps (Narrowband connectivity, India ranked 5th)

·         8.4%—Internet connections in India that are 2Mbps or more (Broadband connectivity, India ranked 88th)

·         66%—Internet connections globally that are 2Mbps or more

·         0.5%—Internet connections in India that are 5Mbps or more [more? Seriously?] (High Broadband, India ranked 60th)

·         27%—Internet connections globally that are 5Mbps or more

·         9,602,386—Unique IPs in India

·         1.5Mbps—Average speed in Hyderabad, fastest connectivity in India (Chennai is second with 1.2Mbps)

·         0.8Mbps—Average speed in New Delhi and Mumbai

·         1.1Mbps—Average speed in Bangalore and Kolkata

·         1664Kbps—Average mobile speeds in India

·         204MB—Average data downloaded on mobile phones in India

These stats come in addition to some that I've previously written. In a January 2011 report, the Telecomm Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said India has 11.21 Million Broadband users and in November 2011, Nielsen said India has 80 Million Internet users. Figures attached with Akamai's report:

India – World’s third largest country by Internet population – is still struggling to reach to any justifiable network infrastructure level. The country is ranked at 114th position globally with an average Internet connection speed of 1.3 Mbps. Interestingly, in spite of being the second largest country, by internet population, average internet connection speed in India is the slowest in the region, according to the latest report from Akamai.

Eventually, APAC dominated at the global level as three countries from the region topped the list with fastest average Internet connectivity. In Q1 2013, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong all witnessed modest quarterly increase, growing to 14.2Mpbs, 11.7 Mbps and 10.9 Mbps Internet connectivity respectively. Further more, besides these three, Switzerland is the only country at global level that managed to surpass 10 Mpbs average Internet connectivity in Q1 2013.

Though, avg. Internet speed in India remained lowest in APAC region, with 20% Q-O-Q change, India registered the fastest growth. The state of Internet in China – world’s largest country by population and Internet population both – is equally deterring; Ranked at 98th position at global level, average internet connection speed remained 1.7 Mbps in China. To make it more worst, China witnessed negative 5.6% Q-O-Q growth in Internet connection speed.

While evaluating average peak internet connection speed in APAC region, research found India reaching 10.2 Mbps while Hong Kong topped the list with 63.6 Mbps. Besides Hong Kong, Japan was the only ASIAN country that had an average peak internet connection speed at/above 50 Mbps.

The report clearly highlights the bad state of Internet in India and China. Besides being at the bottom, yearly growth in both the countries is also not quite promising compared to other Asian countries. Majority of ASIAN countries, where average Internet connectivity speed remained in single digit, registered more than 30% year-over-year growth compared to 21% and 20% in India and China respectively.

Top section of the list remains intact as South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore are the only countries having more than 10% adoption level of High Broadband (> 10 Mbps) in APAC region. In India the adoption rate remains modest 0.3% though, the growth remains promising as the country recorded 102% Q-O-Q change – highest among all ASIAN countries.

Unfortunately, India presents poor show in normal Broadband connectivity (>4 Mbps) as most of the ASIAN countries had double-digit adoption level compared to India with 2.4% adoption level.

87% data users in India access internet through mobiles: TRAI

A whooping 87 per cent of data users in India access internet through mobile phones and tablets, according to a report of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

As per the report, there are 164.81 million users in India who have internet access. Out of that 143.20 million subscribers access internet through wireless phones, i.e. mobile phones and tablets.

TRAI data also reports negative growth in the Indian telecom sector. According to data released by TRAI today, the number of telephone subscribers in India increased from 895.51 million at the end of December 2012 to 898.02 million at the end of March this year, registering a growth of 0.28 per cent over the previous quarter Dec-12. This reflects year-on-year (Y-O-Y) negative growth of 5.61 per cent over the same quarter of last year.

On similar lines, total wireless (GSM +CDMA ) subscriber base registered a growth of 0.36 per cent over the previous quarter and subscriber base increased from 864.72 million at the end of December 12 to 867.80 million at the end of March 2013. Thus the year-on-year (Y-O-Y) negative growth rate of wireless subscribers for March 13 is 5.59 per cent.

Interestingly, urban teledensity declined from 149.90 to 146.96 whereas rural subscription increased from 338.54 million to 349.22 million, and rural teledensity increased from 39.85 to 41.02.

However, in a respite to the telecom service provider, the Monthly Average Revenue Per User (ARPU ) for GSM service has been increased by 6.99 per cent, from 98 in December 2012 to 105 in March this year, with YoY increase of 7.84 per cent.

However, though the ARPU for prepaid has increased by 6.62 per cent

(from 339 to 361), the same for the postpaid has been decreased by 0.76% (from

953 to 946). The rise in ARPU was quite obvious, in August last year

Faster internet due to breakthrough in fiber optic technology increasing bandwith

As rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth strains the Internet's capacity, a team of engineers has devised a new fiber optic technology that promises to increase bandwidth dramatically. The new technology could enable Internet providers to offer much greater connectivity, from decreased network congestion to on demand video streaming. The technology centres on donut-shaped laser light beams called ‘optical vortices’, in which the light twists like a tornado as it moves along the beam path, rather than in a straight line. Widely studied in molecular biology, atomic physics and quantum optics, optical vortices (also known as orbital angular momentum, or OAM, beams) were thought to be unstable in fiber, until BU Engineering Professor Siddhartha Ramachandran recently designed an optical fiber that can propagate them. In the paper, Ramachandran and Alan Willner of USC demonstrated not only the stability of the beams in optical fiber but also their potential to boost Internet bandwidth."For several decades since optical fibers were deployed, the conventional assumption has been that OAM-carrying beams are inherently unstable in fibers," said Ramachandran. "Our discovery, of design classes in which they are stable, has profound implications for a variety of scientific and technological fields that have exploited the unique properties of OAM-carrying light, including the use of such beams for enhancing data capacity in fibers," he added. The reported research represents a close collaboration between optical fiber experts at BU and optical communication systems experts at USC. "Siddharth's fiber represents a very unique and valuable innovation. It was great to work together to demonstrate a terabit-per-second capacity transmission link," said Willner, electrical engineering professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Ramachandran and Willner collaborated with OFS-Fitel, a fiber optics company in Denmark and Tel Aviv University. Funded by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the technology could not come at a better time, as one of the main strategies to boost Internet bandwidth is running into roadblocks just as mobile devices fuel rapidly growing demands on the Internet “For several decades since optical fibres were deployed, the conventional assumption has been that OAM-carrying beams are inherently unstable in fibres," said Ramachandran."Our discovery, of design classes in which they are stable, has profound implications for a variety of scientific and technological fields that have exploited the unique properties of OAM-carrying light, including the use of such beams for enhancing data capacity in fibres," he said. Ramachandran and Willner collaborated with OFS-Fitel, a fibre optics company in Denmark, and Tel Aviv University. Traditionally, bandwidth has been enhanced by increasing the number of colours, or wavelengths of data-carrying laser signals - essentially streams of 1s and 0s - sent down an optical fibre, where the signals are processed according to colour. An emerging strategy to boost bandwidth is to send the light through a fibre along distinctive paths, or modes, each carrying a cache of data from one end of the fibre to the other. Unlike the colours, however, data streams of 1s and 0s from different modes mix together; determining which data stream came from which source requires computationally intensive and energy-hungry digital signal processing algorithms.