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Akamai Technologies’ new State of the Internet report, released today and likely every quarter has some interesting findings about the state of the broadband around the world. (Related Posts: OECD report.)

Through our globally deployed server network and by virtue of the billions of requests for Web content that we service on a daily basis, Akamai has a unique level of visibility into the connection speeds of those systems issuing the requests, and as such, of broadband adoption around the globe.

The findings below the fold:
Akamai data shows that South Korea is the leader in delivering what the Massachusetts-based CDN provider calls, high broadband. It means connections that connect to Akamai’s at speeds exceeding 5 Megabits per second. Nearly 64% of South Korean connections qualify as high broadband.

US, by that metric is a deplorable, with only 20 percent connections qualifying as high broadband. Interestingly, when you reduce the connection speed to 2 megabits per second, US ranks at #24 with 62% of connections at speeds exceeding 2 Mbps.

In US, the state of Delaware has 60% connections that qualify as “high broadband.” California scores rather poorly and is not even among the top ten. Thanks to Cablevision, Verizon and Time Warner, New York comes in at #3 with 36% of its connections at speeds exceeding 5 Mbps.

Here are some other interesting fun facts from the report.

* Rwanda and the Solomon Islands topped the list of slowest countries, with 95% or more of the connections to Akamai from both countries occurring at below 256 Kbps. 
* In the United States, Washington State and Virginia turned in the highest percentages of sub-256 Kbps connections. It is ironic because both states have been making a big fiber push.
* Over 323 million unique IP addresses connected to the Akamai network in Q1 2008, with 30% of those IP addresses coming 10% and US from China.
* In the first quarter, the most attacked port was Port 135 used for remote procedure calls on Microsoft operating systems was target of nearly 30% of the attacks observed throughout Q1 2008. 

If you want to read the full report, you can register and grab a copy over on Akamai’s website.

Foreign Body, the new online series from Michael Eisner’s Vuguru and book publisher Putnam, launched the first of 50 episodes today. The series is doing double duty as the prequel to, and a promotional vehicle for the upcoming Robin Cook book of the same name and is created by Big Fantastic, the team behind Vuguru’s previous online hit, Prom Queen.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

The story is an “exotic thriller” centered around medical tourism in India, focusing on “a group of dangerous Indian beauties” whose nursing skills will be put to some nefarious use. From the first episode, it’s clear Body is staying true to most popular entertainment on the web by having one of the said beauties stripping down to her underwear for a quick, pointless frolic in the ocean. The trailer shows that this is just one of many, errr, titillating moments to come.

But will people stick around that long?

There are 50, two-minute episodes which will be released daily. That’s 10 weeks. That’s a whole lotta content. Prom Queen racked up 15 million views, but the vast majority of those were at the beginning of the series. Stats won’t matter as much for this series because it’s really more of about the promo for Cook’s upcoming book, but still, could the story have been served better with fewer episodes? We’ll have to watch and see. (Perhaps Foreign Body will be translated into a shot-for-shot remake Japanese.)

Eisner said he made a couple thousand dollars on the first run of Prom Queen, but lost money on its second season, Summer Heat. Whereas Prom Queen cost Vuguru about $3,000 for every 90 seconds, Foreign Body cost upwards of $10,000 per minute, according to Ryan Wise of Big Fantastic.

Eisner recently said that he thinks storytelling is the next killer app for the web, and that we’ve only just begun to see what’s possible. Interestingly, he also said he doesn’t think good content needs to be broken down into bite-sized nuggets, which almost makes you wonder why Vuguru went with such short episodes over a 10-week release schedule.

With its “big” budget and on-location filming in India, Foreign Body is an ambitious project. Now we’ll have to see if the audience is up to the task.

Tip of the hat to ReelPopBlog.

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