I can’t remember how I came across The State Of The Internet report from Akami last week but wow, what a great document and very useful for my work. One of the topics I discuss a lot internally is where we choose to deploy our Software + Services offerings around the globe. It’s a very different world from packaged software products where you typically follow a population and the installed base of PC’s as to how you prioritise. In a services world a few other factors become crucial:

1. Network (broadband) connectivity in to a country/region
2. Proximity to a datacenter housing your service (affecting network latency)
3. Technology adoption rates – is the population hooked on hosted services?
4. Type of network connectivity – fixed or mobile broadband? Determines what client types you prioritise

All of this becomes an interesting matrix that you munge in to decisions that also include language localisation, product support and more. The Akami report provides some fascinating insights such as:

• The Nordics lead the way in Internet penetration (measured as IP addresses relative to population)
• The Cayman Islands has a higher Internet penetration than the United States or Canada
• South Korea is far and away the leader in high broadband connectivity (over 5mbps)
• Nepal has a greater high broadband connectivity than the UK or Norway
• The fastest US state is Delaware whilst Washington (home to Microsoft) has the highest penetration of slow connectivity (<256k)

There is plenty of other juicy info in here and Akami will be publishing updates each quarter.

In related news news from TechEd today, Bill Gates talked about the millions of servers we’ll have in Microsoft data centers and the balance of providing services to high and low bandwidth locations. Nick Carr provides good coverage of the key points.