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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.
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."
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
In Romania UPC gives 20mbps for ~30$/mo ... and it is considered a developing country.
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
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.
No, it has more to do with which carriers are dominant in different regions.
Verizon is the successor to two of the regional operating companies spun off after the 1984 AT&T divestiture, Bell Atlantic, which covered the mid-Atlantic region, and NYNEX, which merged New England Telephone and New York Telephone. That means the east coast (north of Virginia) has much more FiOS penetration than the rest of the US.
Comcast also has a large presence in the northeast. Regardless of your opinion of their policies, Comcast has offered cable internet service for many years now.
So I suspect the higher speeds on the east coast have more to do with which providers serve these areas than anything else.
The cited study, by the Communication Workers of America, is based on tests taken by people who visited their web site the chance to measure their speeds. Well, I don't know about you, but I've never visited the CWA site, but I bet a lot of CWA members do, and I bet most of them have pretty high-speed connections. Studies like this with self-selected respondents have only minimal "external validity" since the results aren't based on random sampling methods. ("External validity" concerns whether the results of a study can be generalized to some larger universe of interest. In the case of the CWA study, they cannot.)
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.
RI can be covered by a handful of WiFi APs , so that's no surprise.... ;-)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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
call fios, get them to turn on the ethernet jack at the ONT, and run your own router instead of the piece of crap actiontec router they give you. then just do port redirects. also check out noip.com