US ranks 28th for Internet speed

Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Ahh, this is kind of depressing. I'm sure Canada isn't too far behind, but the USA ranks 28th in the world for overall Internet speeds, which honestly, is ridiculous. The USA is a nation rich with technology, yet the country lags seriously behind in overall Internet speed. It's an embarrassment. The numbers? The average speed in the US is 5.1Mbit/s, while Korea's average is 20.4Mbit/s and Japan's is 15.8MBit/s.

I personally have 10Mbit/s, which is pretty much the best around here for the price/performance. Anything higher doubles in price and still has limiting bandwidth caps and upload speeds (1Mbit/s upload, 20MBit/s download).

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-tc-biz-tech-broadband-0825-0aug30,0,2465151.story
 
Merlin

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
I'm going to say that that was last year's findings. You can get 50 mbps now, I have 22 mbps and can donwload 1.4 gigs in 10-11 minutes. The new docsis 3.0 just came out, so next year the totals will change
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
That is an interesting source for this data. The site the newspaper grabbed the statistics from is a website that runs speed tests, and the site itself exists solely to promote higher internet speeds for the US. OECD and others have published different numbers, but whatever the precise number the general fact / trends remains the same. The US is falling further behind every year. The findings for this article are from this year.

There are good reasons for some of the discrepancy, such as Japan's very dense population levels per square mile making it affordable to roll out fiber to the masses. Still, its the sad truth much of rural America is lucky to even get the choice to use a basic tier DSL service at a high cost.

I don't see DOCSIS changing anything, we had the technology with DOCSIS 1.1 to roll out much higher speed cable tiers than was offered. I'm next door to Comcast (Using TWC) and the modem I am on supports DOCSIS 1.1 / 2.0. Yet after looking at the speeds they provide they are not even using speeds that require DOCSIS 2.0 so there's no point in Time Warner rolling out 3.0 modems. For example your speed of 22mbps is supported by DOCSIS 1.1 spec, so I don't see what the big deal with about new DOCSIS specs is? DOCSIS 1.1 is supposed to give a usable 38mbits down and 9 up, 2.0 takes that to 27mbits upstream. TWC only recently upgraded my tier to 15/2mbps service, and the faster tiers they introduced are going to cost in the triple digits per month.

The potential is there for the US to be significantly higher, but not at the current costs and roll out of infrastructure. Heck, I still see 56K service being advertised during the evening news... groups like Netzero wouldn't be dumping money on commercials for the past year if they weren't getting customers from it.

Lastly, and something not really mentioned, is that the US is falling further behind. In 2007 OECD ranked the US 14th in broadband speeds, in 2008 that fell to 24th if I am reading the correct charts. If small scale fibre deployments aren't going to change the numbers then a small speed boost on cable tiers isn't going to help much either.
 
Last edited:
R

Rebeca

Obliviot
There are some communities here in the U.S. that are rolling out their own fiber at affordable prices, but AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast don't look kindly upon those sort of projects... and the truth is none of those big companies has taken the initiative to make a real difference regarding this issue. They waited too long to work on improvements.

They were thinking of putting fiber in Chicago some years ago. The idea sounded good:

http://www.cityofchicago.org/CivicNet/

But it never took place and I'm not sure if it ever will.

We can't trust AT&T and the rest of the gang to take care of this issue. I believe that for any real change, the government will have to do something. Recently, Google was also trying to create awareness, not just about the speed issue, but also availability. There are still areas that don't have access to decent high speed internet.
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Actually that's a great point Rebeca, I forgot all about that. I can't even remember which city rolled out their own municipal fibre, but they got taken to court over it by the telecos.

The big companies would rather fight municipal fiber than deploy their own, its just absurd to be honest. Plenty of other articles out there besides this one: http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202422769174&rss=ltn

Of course, it could always be worse: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm
 
R

Rebeca

Obliviot
Haha. I had read that article before... and I've lived in a country with laughable (or depressing) internet speeds, so I know it could be much worse, but this isn't about "oh look how much better we are compared to developing countries!" So, the U.S. telecoms better get ahead of the game or I'll move to Japan. :p
 
gruntSNP

gruntSNP

Obliviot
Amen to that Rebeca. I've lived in South Korea and Japan plus visited a friend in Sweden...amazing speeds.
 
R

Rebeca

Obliviot
From those three, where did you get the best speeds? And to what part of Japan did you go to? (Are you fluent in Korean and Japanese?)
 
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
When I was in Taiwan a few months ago, I was sitting at a cafe (85c) with a friend, and since I had my laptop with me, I decided to crack it open and show him a few pictures. Little did I realize, I forgot to copy my photos to the laptop before leaving home. Luckily, there was an open WiFi connection (not the cafe's... it was a home connection), so I connected and was online within a few seconds.

What impressed me was this. This was just someone's home Internet, and although I was connected via WiFi, the connection was rock-stable... I couldn't believe it. Within seconds, I was logged into my home PC, and I downloaded all the photos I wanted to show my friend. I downloaded slowly, but it's because I was topping-out my upload speed at home.

I didn't think to test the download speed, but the fact that it was so reliable, and I managed to connect to my home PC and download images within seconds, from a PC half the earth away, was quite impressive.
 
gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
Expanding on what Kougar has already stated, there are lots of dead zones (rural towns with no internet service provider willing to invest in laying fiber optic cables) in America. My friend lives in a location where Time Warner Cable would charge $50,000+ to install high speed internet at his home. He survives on dial up.

I can't wait till FIOS become ubiquitous. It's faster and cheaper than most every other option available.
 
X

xistop

Obliviot
South Korea is the spot for me. 100mbit all around, my friend has FTTH for about $35. Geographically laying fiber is much easier in Korea, a km of fiber can reach many more people then say in the US.
 
gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
xistop said:
South Korea is the spot for me. 100mbit all around, my friend has FTTH for about $35. Geographically laying fiber is much easier in Korea, a km of fiber can reach many more people then say in the US.
Click to expand...


100 Mbit = 11.9 MBytes per second.

You're kidding me, right?
 
gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
xistop said:
Why do you find that unusual?
Click to expand...

Because that would be faster than anything I have seen personally. My school's computers max out at 6MB per second.

Residentially, the fastest option people have available is FIOS and that tops at 5 MB per second.
 
X

xistop

Obliviot
gibbersome said:
Because that would be faster than anything I have seen personally. My school's computers max out at 6MB per second.

Residentially, the fastest option people have available is FIOS and that tops at 5 MB per second.
Click to expand...

The line is 100mbit, the actual speeds it varies depending on the server. The fastest I remember hitting was about 8.3MB/s to a GigE line.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top