Barely a day goes by without some discussion in technology and business circles about the poor state of broadband services in Australia. Now, a new report doesn’t make things look any better.

Grandly named The State of the Internet, the report was released last week by online content distribution company Akamai. It gives a snap shot of a range of online trends, including access speeds, in countries around the world.

Akamai is well positioned to report on such things. While it’s not a well-known consumer brand, the company serves much of the rich media content enjoyed by internet users around the world. It has high-capacity servers in strategic locations and is constantly monitoring the performance of the global computer network to ensure its hosted content gets to those who are looking for it.

I came across a copy of the report during the week, and was keen to find out how Australia ranked in global terms when it came to factors such as internet penetration and connection speeds. Unfortunately, it didn’t make for happy reading. In fact, in the entire report, Australia is mentioned exactly zero times.

One interesting metric listed was the number of unique IP addresses per head of population in countries around the world. Topping the list was Sweden with 0.4 IPs per head, followed by Norway and Iceland with 0.37 per head. Other countries in the top 10 included the Cayman Islands, Denmark, British Virgin Islands and the United States. Australia was nowhere to be seen.

Another metric was instances of high-speed broadband (defined as 5Mbps or above) connections as a proportion of all internet connections. Topping this list was South Korea where 64% of all connections were deemed fast. This was followed by Japan (48%), Hong Kong (35%) and Sweden (29%). Again, Australia was nowhere to be seen in the top-10 list.

Sure, we’re a small country, but can’t we do better than this? The sooner all the talk about optic fibre roll-outs and national competition actually produces something tangible, the better it will be for all of us.