Kenya has the highest internet connection speed in Africa and in the middle-east according to the Akamai State of the Internet Report 2016.

According to the report, Kenya posted a strong quarterly Connection speed 43% – the highest in the region—to join Israel and Qatar as the only surveyed countries in the region to have an average connection speed above 10 Mbps.

Kenya recorded an average internet speed of 15mbps (megabytes per second) followed by Israel at 14.4mbps, South Africa at 6.6 mbps, Morroco at 5.2 mbps and Nigeria at 4.1 mbps.

“Kenya overtook third-quarter leader Israel to gain the top spot for average connection speeds among the surveyed Middle East and Africa countries in the fourth quarter.” the report says.

Globally, Kenya ranked 23rd out of the 129 countries sampled in the report with South Korea topping the list with the fastest connectivity at 26.1 mbps.

Quite notable is that Kenya, which recorded the highest connection in Akamai’s 2016 report, did not qualify for inclusion in the 2015 report as its data then was so insignificant.

“As noted previously, Kenya did not qualify for inclusion one year ago. It has clearly seen tremendous growth in high-speed connectivity in the past year.”

Akamai is the world’s leading content delivery network (CDN) services provider for media and software delivery, and cloud security solutions.

According to the latest statistics by the communication authority (CAK) Kenya has 31,985,048 Internet users as of Sept/2015 (69.6% of the population).

Mobile phone penetration, which has also been touted as one of the highest in the region stands at 88 per cent with 37.8million subscribers.

Last year, Kenya was second after S.A in internet usage in Africa. According to pew research, the growth was attributed to increased affordability of Internet services and also on the growth of e-commerce