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East Coast Broadband Fastest In USA
Death Metal Maniac writes "The study, which was conducted by affordable-broadband advocacy group Speed Matters, found that the nine states with the fastest median download connections are all located on the East Coast. Rhode Island (6.8Mbps) and Delaware (6.7Mbps) have the fastest, and nearly triple the national median download speed of 2.3Mbps. Rounding out the Top 5 states are New Jersey (5.8Mbps), Virginia (5Mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6Mbps)."
That's nice.
Meanwhile, as of last week, we STILL cannot buy FIOS in Philadelphia. No matter how much I want to give Verizon my money, they just won't take it.
Does anyone have comparable statistics for Europe and the relevant parts of Asia?
I live on the East Coast (of Japan) and have a 100Mbps-rated optical fibre connection. Though the fastest I've got out of it is a piddling 87Mbps.
Muahaha.
elboe smork
This test is the same like those websites where you can test your download speed. They are all flawed in that they don't take your subscription into account. If you have somebody who subscribed for a cheapass 512/512 ADSL, he pulls the average down. Those tests should be limited to those who pay for "all you can get". Otherwise it tells more about a states economical position then about their internet access.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
You know who I thank for that? Hank Scorpio!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
In Northern VA, Cox just upped my speed from 5 Mbps down/2 Mbps up to 10/2, and increased cost by about $2/month. This of course is to stave off the FIOS menace which also upped their speeds and rates by a similar amount. Nevermind that I don't have access to FIOS, they still did it for everybody else that does.
Might the higher speeds on the East Coast be because our cities are closer together allowing for more lines, thereby allowing for more competition? From Richmond to Boston are several large and major cities (Richmond, DC, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philly, Newark, NYC and Boston) in comparatively close proximity.
East Coast. Rhode Island (6.8Mbps) and Delaware (6.7Mbps) have the fastest, and nearly triple the national median download speed of 2.3Mbps. Rounding out the Top 5 states are New Jersey (5.8Mbps), Virginia (5Mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6Mbps).
The states with the slowest median download speeds primarily are located in the Midwestern or Western regions of the United States, including Idaho (1.3Mbps), Wyoming (1.3Mbps), Montana (1.3Mbps) and North Dakota (1.2Mbps); Alaska had the slowest download speed (0.8Mbps). I
Is anyone surprised that small, densely populated states have higher download speeds than large, sparsely populated ones? It's the same argument that comes up every time worldwide broadband speeds are discussed: small and dense = easier to wire.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Look, all of the states with fast median download connections are small states. Its way easier to wire up a small state especially if their demographics have most people living in urban areas.
Imagine trying to provide optimum connections to an entire state like Alaska or Texas. The more rural areas you have the more the median download speed for that state will take a hit (because its cheaper to throw in high speed to an urban area than 1000 small towns).
In Romania UPC gives 20mbps for ~30$/mo ... and it is considered a developing country.
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
Surprising data. Broadband has apparently never got to the US?
What about EU countries where 10/20Mbps ADSL2 (peak, not average) are the norm, and where 95% of the territory is covered
What about fiber providers, again in EU, who easily surpass the 20Mbps?
Seen the amount os sp*m and heavy flash websites are often tailored to America's final users, I wonder what will happen to the world when american broadband average speeds will surpass the 6Mbps.
Where I live: 1 Mbit (divided asymmetrically into up- and downstream)
I am really looking forward to moving away from home to the town of my university. (Which, btw, has more than 200 inhabitants.)
Eh, I know for a fact that no matter where I go in Massachusetts, standard cable or DSL is still abysmally slow. I'm not about to pay the price for "premium" service though, which is still actually slower than one can get in just Greenwich, Connecticut.
Two years ago, when I lived in Paris, I got 20Mbit. Now I live in New York and get more like 4Mbit.
Yep, the world's richest country is years behind in technology infrastructure..
The study obviously wasn't that thorough. We have Fiber in utah that gives you 50 Mbps UP and down for $80/mo. It's a helluva lot cheaper and better than Verizon fios.
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
So far it seems that the fastest AND most affordable internet (combo) here in the states is available in the Cincinnati area (that I've personally seen). It's got 3 major cities within about 1.5 hours, one of the busiest airports in the mid-west (I'm still EST time zone), a few major train rails and highways 70,71 and 75 all very near by. This makes it a prime location for major companies, except that there aren't THAT many (proctor and gamble is here for example).
I mention this because there aren't too many nerdy types like me out here.. except that they set up the broadband out here to handle major *potential* commercial needs.
So here I sit paying $50 a month for "20 meg download" (which is literally about 2.4-2.5 megabytes per second at maxed connection). That's the upgraded package. Normally it's $40 for "10 meg download"... but 10$ more for double the connection? Easy choice for me! What is interesting is that my speeds actually can hit that through usenet / bittorrents.
Just curious, do these speeds at that low of a price exist anywhere else out there for that cheap? I've not yet heard of that elsewhere. I use Insight Broadband. Note: Internet speeds are great, but the commercials and customer service / "pay-by-internet" really really suck.
Three of the top five are among the smallest states in the Union by total land area. They are mostly densely populated, too.
Virginia has the extra bonus that it has suburbs of Washington, D.C. and several government installations. The Pentagon is actually not in D.C. (although its postal address says it is), but is in Arlington. The FBI and CIA are headquartered in the state. One of the largest USMC bases is there, along with the DEA and FBI training centers. There's a Federal Reserve Bank. Qimonda has a DRAM fab there, and Genworth Financial is headquartered in the state. Of course it has all kinds of telecom infrastructure.
I hope the counts includes all the places that the cable and fiber providers that provide 0 Mbps. When we are only stones throw away, all in Maryland.
IMHO the zeros should be factored in with a large weighting. I would be happy with 1.4 Mbps (t1 speeds) and a low latency.
Al Gore was born in Washington D.C. so obviously the internet is fastest on the east coast. The packets don't have to travel as far to reach him.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
It's a lot easier to connect everyone to a network when they aren't spread out as much as they are in many western states.
Further evidence of the media's East-Coast Bias.
RI can be covered by a handful of WiFi APs , so that's no surprise.... ;-)
I live in a condo in one of the suburbs of Philadelphia where FiOS was specifically being rolled out to originally. I STILL cannot get FiOS even though people in the development across the street and in the development behind me can!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
The only thing wrong with NJ is the taxes, cost of property, and the state gov.
Beyond that it's a nice place to live. Everyone always thinks all of NJ is inner-city Newark because that's all the see from the Parkway and Turnpike because of trees and sound dividers, or when they land at Newark International Airport, or look at us across the river.
When it fact it's a nice place with plenty of trees and forests.
Some people I know were talking about how they drove to NJ for the first time from out west. They were flabbergasted when they realized they'd been driving in NJ for over an hour and had stopped at a few places in NJ. They said they never saw that portion of NJ on the TV.
Ok I didn't RTFA but doesn't it only really matter for what municipality you live in, and not the state/region average? In that scenario, my service far outpaces every one listed in the summary, at somewhere around 15Mbps for $25/month.
80% of southwestern VA is restricted to Dial-up still. I dont understand up it can be on the top 5
I'm glad someone has 6.8 Mbs...just hope they don't actually use it. DPI, caps, throttling....these speeds only apply if you use them for services the telco wants you to use them on.
Millions in gov't subsidies and right-of-ways thru your property and all I got was this lousy duopoly.
THL phish sticks
I get about 756k in Miami for $10 a month. I could go faster I guess, but why bother? When I went from 2400 baud to 44k baud, that was really cool. When I went from 44k baud to cable modem, that was really cool. Any incremental increase after that is eh.
Speed Matters, which is a project of the Communication Workers of America, conducted the study between May 2007 and May 2008 by asking users visiting its Web site to test out their connection speed to check how quickly they could download and upload data. In total, nearly 230,000 connections in the United States were tested.
a survey of visitors to their website. Gee, that sounds like a scientifically valid sample.
I'm paying $25 for 12mbps in Tennessee.
Want to know why we have slow broadband? GREED! Telco's have figured out we will all open our wallets at a certain speed and are trying to milk us for every penny without upgrading their infrastructure. Why don't you have 100mb fibre at your house? Because the Telco's want to spend that $60+ per month on ferrying around their CEO in a chartered jet rather than to provide the service your paying for. Its rather comical that the Cable companies and telco's are screaming about bandwidth when we have the most developed backbone network in the world. All of those high speed foreign connections are running into a smaller backbone than we have here in the USA yet the providers scaremonger that with HDTV the internet is going to melt down. Perhaps their profit centers might but the current backbone is more than capable.
I work at a large backbone internet provider and we have a vast untapped amount of dark fibre. Most of the bandwidth issues that you hear about from ISP's are artificially created. It's not because the bandwidth is not available its because the higher ups want to pressure their network engineers to squeeze every penny out of that connection.
Its about time people stood up and called shenanagans on the lies that ISP's spreading on the technical difficulties of dialing up better speeds. The only thing stopping them from providing you the speeds you pay for is GREED!
East coast bandwidth should be fastest in the USA, I'd be surprised if it was fastest in Guatemala.
MP3 Search Engine
NoVa used to be the home of PSInet, WorldCom, AOL, CAIS, XO, Ardent, UUNet, ... there's a whole lot of connectivity in the Reston / Ashburn / Dulles corridor heading out 7, as there's still a massive number of tech companies out there. And it's also the current home of 3 of the 5 peering points of MAE-East.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
What is that competition you are talking about? For last three years, I do not have any choice other than comcast for "high speed internet". And this is central NJ - probably the largest urban sprawl in the whole freaking world.
Canada's fastest ISP is Montreal's Videotron with 25Mbps. At my parents' place in Burlington, Ontario, they have 10Mbps, but could go to 16 if they wanted it. I've just moved to Toronto... I think we have Bell Sympatico, which is 6, and I consider that slow.
Here in Indiana (Insight Communications) you get 10Mbit access for like $45, which is pretty nice. You can also pay $10 more to get 20mbit.
Of course they do. The east is the leading edge of the continent as the earth spins eastward, the northeast even more so - so the electrons are moving the fastest as the earth spins in that direction. Rhode island of course beat the larger Maine NH and MA because it's so tiny the electrons don't have to go so far. And I know what's next - then why didn't tiny CT fare as well? Aha! It's much hillier than RI! Delaware? Small and flat. See? By the time they get from the northeast to the rest of the country, they build up friction in the tubes and slow down. They paid for this research? The average member of congress could have explained it exactly this way.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I just got Fios in my neighborhood, but the area is still mainly served by Road Runner. And I just don't understand how the cable companies are going to compete with this. I have the 50/20 service, which allows me to download a 700MB mov... er... linux distro in about 20 minutes. Seeding overnight I often wake up with a 35 - 50 share ratio. No bandwidth caps. No throttling. Just straight uncluttered tubes. Contrast with my buddy who lives 2 blocks away and is stuck on Road Runner Turbo (claiming 16Mbps lol). He is LUCKY to get 2Mbps. Most of the time his actual speeds are measured in Kbps. And oh do they throttle so don't even THINK about doing anything other than browsing. Yes, I pay twice as much as he does ($95/month), but I am getting 100+ times the internet connection. More importantly, I want something, there is a market for it, it's not cheap, but somebody is providing that service and I'm happy to pay. So why haven't companies like Comcast and Time Warner caught on to this? What's wrong with having grandma internet connections for the grandmas, man pipes for manly men and charge accordingly? Am I missing something here?
When it fact it's a nice place with plenty of trees and forests.
I worked in Princeton for 8 months, commuting through Newark airport every weekend.
Driving south on 95, I saw the worst of NJ. But once you get past Linden and Elizabeth, it's an entirely different state.
If NJ could cede Newark/Jersey City to NYC, and Camden/Trenton to Philadelphia (along with the corrupt state government), it would be a nice place.
RoadRunner in San Antonio, Texas just bumped their premium "RoadRunner Turbo" customers to 22Mbps down while remaining at 1Mbps up. $69/monthly. Not a bad deal to me, especially with their very high reliability and uptime. DSL and other providers are still lagging at 2-5Mbps locally.
In your face, California!
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I have FIOS TV and phone but have yet to jump from Comcast to FIOS internet due to the fact that Verizon blocks ports 80 and 25. I run my own web and mail servers for personal (not commercial) use and don't want to give them up.
Does anyone know of any ways around these limitations (besides paying extra to verizon).
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
28Mbps, all you can get for €29.90
That also includes TV, unlimited international phone calls, and so on.
germanfag says: we have more than twice that speed, n00bs
I live 5 minutes away from MAE-East so you'd think internet access would cost less here, but I'm paying $60 per month for 15/2. I'd be willing to bet that the recent surge in advertised speeds has more to do with marketing than capacity.
At some point a few years ago ISPs realized that most web services don't have the bandwidth on their end to serve lots of users with 15 megabit connections, so they'd never actually have to provide all that bandwidth. They decided they were going to use speed purely as a marketing gimmick and started selling "15 megabit" connections with no capacity to back them up. That's why they hate BitTorrent so much -- it forces them to deliver the product they advertise (what an insane concept!). They oversell bandwidth by a factor of 100 and then turn around and label people who actually use the capacity they pay for as "bandwidth hogs". It's pitiful.
No no no no!
NJ should take Philadelphia, not the other way around! We don't want it!
What time of day did they measure it ?
The East Coast wakes up 3 hours before the West Coast. We have the internet pretty much to ourselves until noon...
I live in Jersey. If the level of service here is considered to be in the Top 5, the rest of you lot are screwed.
The powers in the music, movie, and television industries want to keep our transfer speeds as low as possible. Otherwise, every single one of us will turn into horrible, filthy media pirates.
There are no technical reasons whatsoever. It is entirely fabricated by cartels who want to control the United States populace, and these same cartels either own or are in collusion with the ISPs.
Here in rural (think Amish) PA we have 15 megabits from the local cable provider. Not sure how long it will last though as Comcast is trying to push into the area and take over.
Here is the list. I was going to just post it, but Google's HTML cache won't copy/paste easily and its source is full of DIVs, which slashdot won't let you use in a comment.
If you want the PDF, it's linked from the linked HTML version.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
From New York City, inside the "speed zone"
I was paying $50 for 3Mb DSL, which only negotiated at 1.7Mb on my router. The only other mainstream alternative was TimeWarner, who doesn't sell naked cable (i.e. you need their "extended basic" service for $45 before you can get Internet service), so I thought I was screwed.
However I was able to get Earthlink 8Mb for $75 with unlimited long distance and various other stuff.
I was worried the low speed negotiation that hampered Verizon would continue when I switched to Earthlink, but I get 750Kb downloads consistently, so that wasn't the case.
I have Earthlink's DNS crap and the slight double click on the phone when I first pick up, but other than that, the service has been stellar.
The difference for me was the response on some sites like Youtube and the ability to stream radio stations without interruption.
Let's face it broadband in the US is going to be intermittently crappy for our lifetime. It's in the hands of companies who don't give a hoot about anything but their own short term goals.
Any solution wherever you are will only temporarily solve the problem.
This sig is alpha and shouldn't be viewed on production machines
Exactly! If you google a space photo of the night-time side of the US, you will see that the east coast is populated much more densely than the west. Companies get more per infrastructure investment in densely populated areas. There's more potential customers per box or node.
http://dmsp.ngdc.noaa.gov/images/usa_small.gif
Table-ized A.I.
Out here on the West Coast, my local telco (GTE) was bought out by Verizon years ago. They proceeded to:
I live within spitting distance of Microsoft's campus and ... still no DSL. Oddly enough, I have a rental property out in the boondocks (also Verizon territory). When the power company began developing broadband, Verizon immediately plowed in FiOS. So my peasant tenant has broadband, but not me.
It appears that broadband goes in as a response to competition, not based on serving the customer.
Have gnu, will travel.
Shhhhh.... Don't tell everyone! We're crowded enough as it is.
-AC
Deep in the swamps of South Jersey
I don't understand this at all. Tupac said "Let's show these fools how we do it on the west side, cause you and I know it's the best side." All this talk about west coast is the best coast, now you're trying to tell me east side is better? That doesn't even rhyme! How do you expect me to believe you?
its like the article on slashdot awhile back comparing high speed in the far east to the usa: pointless
what you are really comparing is population densities
notice something interesting about the states listed? they are all small, compact, and densely populated
new york state, for example, is sparsely populated, mostly, but i'll bet you speeds in the city and on long island are as high as anywhere else
so new york state isn't listed, or california, but that doesn't mean a damn thing, because all you are doing is taking note that these states have large areas that are low in population density, and therefore broadband penetration
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nope ... well not for me anyway.
My choices are:
1) AT&T DSL ... with an alleged speed of "up to 3Mbps" that actually maxes out at 2.4Mbps. The 6Mbps "Elite" option from AT&T is "not available in my area".
2) Comcast ... which might go faster, but I'd have to average the speed down for all the days when it was 0Mbps (based on anecdotal evidence from friends who have Comcast and have complained about downtime).
Actually, bad analogy guy is on the no fly list. They won't tell him he is on the list or what he has done wrong.
THey do tell him he can use the slower car to drive to an other state.
all I have is 512 Kb ADSL you insensitive clods!
In my particular area in Wisconsin with almost 100,000 people we almost all have Road Runner which is 8 megabits and we also actually get that speed in reality. Florida is also really big into Road Runner and they usually get speed increases first. I guess the northern Wisconsin dialup rural people went and ruined the average but I don't think we should count them lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
After you get up to a couple megabits a second of download speed, who cares?
What I would REALLY appreciate is some upload speed. I understand why the situation is the way that it is ("All your base are belong to us.") but I'd love to be able to do really high quality voice conferencing.
Also, I notice that no one here is complaining about quality, per se. That's good and it's a pretty big difference from attitudes ten years ago.
--Richard
I live 70 miles from Washington DC and less than 40 miles from Baltimore, MD and I only have dialup, no broadband access (except satellite).
In the midwest I think my service is around 5MB through the cable (shared) with 7 and up available.
But websites come up super quick, Youtube plays and other websites are very responsive. In other words, the internet for the masses works just fine. After a certain point, diminishing returns negates any further investment. There is currently no compelling reason to shell out for more (unless you are downloading a ton of videos).
Given the higher population found in east coast states, this is hardly surprising. It's easier to build out quality broadband profitably if you don't have to run cable across some huge empty state like Alaska.
But they wont let me actually use it :)
All kidding aside, when its actually up and running ( goes down 10x a day ) i might get 1MB/s.
Never had a lick of trouble for nearly 10 years with the provider they bought out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have, on occasion, gotten my connection up to 15M-30M. This is in Spokane, WA where you wouldn't expect those kinds of speeds.. my guess is, Comcast is testing higher speeds here..
-Myke
Net result: your assets for storing data are now useless (good) because the internet can store everything for you. The internet can also provide the data not only at a reasonable speed that is "good enough". Finally, you can access your data and services anywhere the internet is available (which we can almost consider "everywhere" as long as you stay within developed parts of the world).
.
The telco is selling residential service to a mass consumer market. The geek who sucks up bandwidth like free beer from the keg doesn't help their bottom line.
We have Fiber in utah that gives you 50 Mbps UP and down for $80/mo.
unfortunately, there is nothing the mormons are allowed to download that can take advantage of it.
Well, most years, the hockey team is pretty good.
That is pretty much the list of redeeming qualities of New Jersey. Actually before Byrne was governor, it was a pretty cool place to live, especially South Jersey. Now it has completely gone to hell.
I'm currently on 20mbits down/1mbit up, and it's regarded as "normal" if you live in the city.
I could get 25mbits download if I could be bothered to switch ISP.
No sig today...
Indeed, I get a 20/5 package from Cox and it works fairly well. I run my three types of VoIP over it including Vonage, Skype and MagicJack with great results.
But I want what they have in Japan. Not only do they get more bandwidth, they pay less for it.
Haha. I live in NJ.
We need higher speeds so the cable links won't seem like dial-up. All those third-party ad connections and interconnections can really slow down the experience.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sorta sorry for hot-linking someone else's gaphic, but this GDP-density graphic does indicate the same trends the study found as indicated on the graphic on Page 1 of Speedmatters.org's report. Seems logical to me that it would given how the FCC is oriented these days. The same way "party line" phone systems disappeared last from "economically less advanced areas" so will slow internet access. It almost always takes government intervention for services like this to be rolled out to non-rich zones of the country.
Thoughts?
-Matt
> We are talking median speed. If you and your 5 neighbors have speeds of 1,1,2,3 and 87 your median speed is 2Mbps.
I don't think many people have less than 10 Mbps connections in Japan from what I hear.
I have several co-worker that are here from Japan and they have an average network speed of 55mb/s and feel like I have Yugo on a Autobahn.
It is a pity that our nation doesn't have the guts to revamp the network infrastructure and update our network to industrial world (or better) network speeds.
I live in ohio and I'm still on 768k dsl from at&t.
hell, I had dialup until 2006.
All the more reason to use Azeroth (US East) on battle.net.
Sorry, I've been playing lots of DotA lately.
They keep reporting these numbers of 2 to 3 mbps download speed as median.
How can you have a speed of 6 and then have a median of 2.3.
Everybody knows that the telco's are going to report that the average is now 2.3. They are going to say that they are providing adequate service. See the average is 2.3, these people are just whiny babys, don't pay attentions to them, they get all jealous because someone has faster.
Hey, I have 2.5, sometimes. A lot of the times it just goes out. But hey, that's my problem, I have to take off of work and show them a line that may or may not be working at the time. So if they show up and test the line and it is working then they just leave.
And there is no competition in my area, none.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
(along with the corrupt state government)
I think you're overlooking the history of significant corruption at the county level as well :)
Actually, if the NJ state government (and some of the county and larger municipal governments) were either stupid or corrupt, I could find it easier to forgive. It's the fact that they're both that just sets my teeth on edge. The governor in this state just has too much power - they're the only state official elected in the executive branch. No election for state attorney general, lieutenant governor, treasurer (that would make a big difference), secretary of state, etc.
With Road Island and Delaware coming in first and second respectively, I think it is obvious that size (and/or density) does matter.
Respect the Constitution
I live in Sweden and have a 1000Mbps-rated optical fibre connection. Though the fastest I've got out of it is a piddling 900Mbps. Muahaha.
I'm compelled to believe that you must be exaggerating.
Yep, the world's richest country is years behind in technology infrastructure..
Net worth or capital on hand?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The study obviously wasn't that thorough. We have Fiber in utah that gives you 50 Mbps UP and down for $80/mo. It's a helluva lot cheaper and better than Verizon fios.
They're talking median. u-238 here has been desperately trying to get Utopia in his town for a few years, after Comcast nailed him to the wall over downloads (which his rrdtool graphs refute).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
OMG. 12 years ago, we sat in an office building in Vienna, VA waiting for our 128K ISDN to be installed. While were totally disgusted by it, it was better than the cable company's dial-up/cable hybrid 'solution'.
Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), the supposed "Heart of Communication" didn't even sell Internet services through ISDN to small businesses back then so we had to go third party. And yet...
RIGHT DOWN THE BLOCK was the almighty Mae East. We'd eat lunch, staring forlornly at the Unattainable and wonder how long it would take for the fiber to eventually arrive.
Inevitably, plots would form consisting of technical and/or social engineering stunts; like trying to convince someone over there to leave an 802.11b wireless open for us, etc.
Good times, good times... ;)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Here in rural Western Washington, I get 4.5 Mbps downstream from S.F., 3.3 Mbps from D.C., and 2.8 Mbps from Chicago using Speakeasy's bandwidth tester.
Gee, is that the "technological advanced USA"?
6 mbps was broadband last millenium (at least in the rest of the world).
Current state of affairs outside the third world country west of the atlantic:
Europe: Broadband = VHDSL (56Mbps), common small band = ADSL 2-6 mbps (rural) to 18 mbps (urban), wireless broadband: 5-7 mbps.
Asean: wired Broadband = 100mbps, some urban areas are deploying gigabit already, wireless broadband = 7 mbps, wired
small band: virtually nonexistant
The only contintent that may not have better infrastructure (bandwidth for the masses)
than the US is africa.
AC
I'm on the right coast and Verizon won't give me DSL and Comcast won't give me cable. All I have is EVDO.
Depends - I get 8 Mbps in my house for free - avg 7 Mbps (I know that's not median - but avg of what I get). I did suffer with 1.5 Mbps for awhile, but I also get 7 Mbps via my wireless emobile service - while commuting on the train, bitches!
Actually no, I'm not. The fibre goes into the basement, and from there I have 1000Mbit cat5e to the whole house. Download speed vary very much depending on the hosting server though, and I often don't get more than ~50Mbit from public servers with load. Many servers seem to cap the download speed too, since it sometimes is rock stable at for example 30Mbit no matter what I do (If I open up more sessions to different sites the 30Mbit speed does not fall, so it's not my end of the line which is choking). The fastest speed I get is from company servers in northern europe, especially Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany.