As it published its annual Year in review, exploring global internet insights and security trends during 2024, connectivity cloud company Cloudflare has revealed that SpaceX’s Starlink service has continued to go from strength to strength, namely that for the second year in a row, global traffic from Starlink in 2024 grew 2.9x, in line with the previous year’s growth rate.
The review, the fifth annual survey of its type, showed clearly that every year, as more people and devices connect to the internet, global traffic surged by 17% year-on-year (YoY), generating new trends that showcase global reliance on its capabilities.
Cloudflare’s network currently spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries/regions, serving an average of over 63 million HTTP(S) requests per second for millions of internet properties, in addition to handling over 42 million DNS requests per second on average.
Looking at the connectivity industry, the study observed 225 major global internet disruptions in 2024, with many due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns of internet connectivity. Cable cuts and power outages were also leading causes.
Aggregated across 2024, 28.5% of IPv6-capable requests were made over IPv6. India and Malaysia were the strongest countries, at 68.9% and 59.6% IPv6 adoption respectively. Some 20.7% of TCP connections are unexpectedly terminated before any useful data can be exchanged.
The top 10 countries ranked by internet speed all had average download speeds above 200 Mbps. Spain was consistently among the top locations across the measured internet quality metrics, and 41.3% of global traffic comes from mobile devices. Indeed, in nearly 100 countries/regions, the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices.
Yet arguably some of the most interesting findings centred around Starlink, which was found to have seen “massive” adoption in new markets. As Starlink added new markets, Cloudflare said it saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations. Malawi experienced the highest increase in traffic (42x) since initiating service in July 2023. The highest increase in 2023 was to be found in Brazil, where Starlink traffic was up over 17x after initiating service in 2022.
Assessing the trends revealed in the report, the connectivity cloud company added that the internet is the cornerstone of global connection, providing access to the critical information and services that power daily lives. Moreover, it said this dependency on the internet has made it the backbone of today’s society, helping first responders save lives, allowing communities to connect with elected officials and register to vote, and supporting global digital economies.
“We rely on the internet almost constantly, yet many still see it merely as a collection of web pages,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare. “But the internet is everywhere, woven throughout almost all of the daily activities of modern life – how we interact and connect on social media, use our smart refrigerators and vacuums, travel from one place to another through rideshare apps, connect to our banks, and more.”