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Want fast Internet in the United States? Try the east coast.
July 15, 2009
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If you’re looking for faster broadband speeds, it’ll help if you’re in the Eastern part of the United States, according to a recent State of the Internet report by Akamai. Larry Dignan wrote about this the other day on ZDNet. Most high-speed broadband accounts in the United States range between 5-10 Mbps. The second-highest group is 10-15 Mbps.
Four out of the five states with the fastest connections were on the east coast. Delaware was no. 1, with 62 percent above 5 Mbps. Next is New Hampshire, then New York, Nevada (perhaps it helps if your state starts with the letter N?) and Vermont (OK, maybe not on the N thing). The bottom five are Mississippi, Ohio (tied with 5 percent above 5 Mbps), Colorado, Illinois and Iowa.
Akamai’s report said the United States is currently 33rd in broadband speed. Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Hong Kong and Monaco have the top five fastest broadband speeds in the world. But perhaps that’s partly due to the numbers of people online in this country; the United States has more than 116.2 million unique IP addresses. China is second, with 44.6 million. In broadband penetration — the measure of how many people per capita are using the Internet, the United States is sixth, after Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and Iceland.
If you’re interested, Washington state and Georgia are tied for the most broadband penetration in the United States, with Illinois, Massachusetts and Missouri after.
This study isn’t really hard news by any stretch — the United States has trailed in broadband speeds for a while, though it ranked two places higher in the world than in Akamai’s fourth-quarter report, Dignan said. Akamai said overall speeds may improve more as DOCSIS 3.0 and fiber to the home connections roll out to more homes and prices fall.
I like checking out information like this, but here’s one thing I thought about as I was scanning Dignan’s article and then the report: Some of us are still using accounts that our ISPs promote as high-speed Internet — but fall below 5 Mbps. Is 1.5 Mbps DSL still considered high-speed? How about 3 Mbps? By these standards, I’m certainly not on a high-speed connection at home.
If you’d like to know more, take a look at these articles from HowStuffWorks.com:
Top 5 Ways to Troubleshoot Your Broadband Internet Connection
How Fiber to the Home Broadband Works
How Broadband Over Powerlines Works
Comments
4 Responses to “Want fast Internet in the United States? Try the east coast.”
Chris Pollette says: Yeah, I kinda know what you mean. I have DSL and am less than a mile from the switch. Theoretically I should be able to get reasonably fast DSL. But as it turns out, the phone company laid the line all the way down the other side of the street, then all the way back to my house.
That makes the loop length so long that I can barely get 1.5 Mbps.
Comcast will be pushing out 50Mb service for internet in the next month or so to Atlanta and Boston… and i think it’s automatic if you are on high speed already in those areas. (woo-hoo!)
Chris Pollette says: Part of the problem I have as far as going away from twisted-pair copper connections is my alarm system. I’m on VOIP now but it uses my existing house wiring. That’s the big reason I haven’t seriously investigated Clear any further.
I get less than 1.5 mbps at home and this is the fastest AT&T (not u-verse) says they can go. They market it as high speed yet when I have been over at friends houses it takes them a few seconds to load a movie or video that might take me half an hour. I live in San Jose! In the Silicon Valley! This is the best they can do?