Slashdot Mirror
Sandy, Utah Tops US Cities For Broadband Speed
darthcamaro writes "If you want to live in the city with the fastest average broadband connection speed in the US, you have to move to Utah. According to Akamai's latest State of the Internet Report, Sandy, Utah is at the top of the list for US cities with the fastest average broadband speeds, with an average connection speed of 33,464 Kbps (33.5 Mbps). Overall in the US, the average broadband connection speed in the third quarter of 2009 came in at 3.9 Mbps, down by 2.4 percent on a year-over-year basis, but that's not a major cause for concern in Akamai's view. 'The overall year-over-year decline in the US average connection speed was relatively minor,' report author David Belson, director of market intelligence at Akamai Technologies said. 'The larger year-over-year sample base may have contributed to the decline, especially as mobile usage grows.'"
...the 95+% of the world that DOESN'T live in the US yawns and goes back to surfing at higher speeds.
Seriously, can we please try to remember that this Internet thing is a global medium?
What the article fails to mention is that this marvelous speed is achieved by the means of a very consumer-friendly "Fair Use Policy" of the ISP which sets the download maximum at 100 kilobytes per month, "for our customers' convenience".
It is an orgasmic convergence of RIAA and MPIAA-friendly corporate stance (no music and movie pilfering possible), glorious marketing opportunity ("We are THE fastest Internet Service Provider in the USA!") and great PR ("All the national statistics clearly show us delivering most outstanding speed in the Nation!"). And it is all possible only because of the great foresight of the CEO of the ISP to replace all the useless "engineers" and "technicians" with Ivy-league educated MBAs.
Behold, for you are seeing the awesome future of US Internet Industry!
On paper, perhaps. Definitely not in practice.
I live in Sandy and have tried three (out of three available) different ISP's in three different houses, and have never been able to get anywhere near the quoted speeds I've been promised. If the capability exists, we're all being throttled to death.
I googled for ISPs in sandy, utah and found the regular players offering 3mbs...
How is the average 33 megabits? Where are all these people getting > 33mbit service? Verizon didn't seem to offer fios with the addresses in sandy utah i plugged in.
Seriously, once you get to 1 mbit, web browsing is about as good as it gets. Like blinking twice as fast, you simply don't notice.
Unless you're into YouTube HD, in which case 4 mbit will be noticeable. I get my television channels delivered on a 4~5 mbit connection. Now, I can see a reason for speed with online backups, etc., but unless you're torrenting, what does your top speed really matter?
You want a car analogy? Where's the metric on which country has the fastest average top-speed per capita? Does it really matter?
What I want to know is, exactly how many people could watch the Superbowl if it was ONLY delivered via the internet. Who cares how fast the last mile is if the web servers and backbone infrastructure are way, way, WAY oversubscribed?
It all just seems like a lot of to-do over something that's not so terribly important.
1- There is nothing else to do in Utah
2- By now, they must be a virtual backup of all the pron on the net
p.s. I'm only kidding, I have never been there ;-)
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
There is no break between towns. This is a home owners association with delusions of grandeure. Unless the news is local, I dont care what part of a town something occured in, It's SLC good enough. I dont want someone to say theyre from Marin because it's a more prestigeous part of the bay area. Or Arvada Colorado, Ft Worth Texas.
Pick the most recognizable city in a 30 mile radius.. and go with it.
I'm offtopic.. but SANDY, come on..
They got broadband connections in San D'oria? Damn you, Elvaans!
Signed, pissed off Bastokan.
... something about Mormons in Utah and high-speed pr0n. Just can't think of a good one...
Correction, Sandy *had* the fastest speed. Sorry folks, they've just been slashdotted.
Didn't expect to see the place that I am living to get that.
Hey, wait a minute... I'm not getting those speeds and I'm smack in the middle of the city... Hmmm... I think it's a conspiracy.
Of course the thing they forget to mention is that it's so cold here in the winter! Ok... maybe not as cold as Montana, but still!
Sandy Utah has two ISPs, Qwest and Comcast plus the occasionally available WISP. Not a single ISP in the Sandy area offers speeds in excess of Comcasts standard 16Mbs high end package. It's absurd that some article lists the average as 33.3Mbs as I don't know a single area where that speed is available and I live in the heart of Sandy. There is Metro Ethernet available at the cost of multiple thousands but no one outside large business has it.
This apparent study of internet speeds is worthless and it's conclusions garbage.
So, according to this article, the US, the lone superpower now has at least 7 cities that have surpassed
the average Japanese or South Korean village in broadband speed.
Pour me some champagne.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Sandy is about 30 minutes south of Salt Lake City, and the U of U. Nice and cold and in the middle of a frozen inversion caused from being in the Salt Lake Valley. Nothing like breathing in dirt when you walk outside... Thus why I'm on my speedy broadband connection somewhere in the middle of the aforementioned city.. =]
What about UTOPIA?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Sandy rejected admission to Utopia and has never been part of the organization. Even in areas where Utopia exists the uptake is significantly less than 50% and the only speeds available are 15Mbs and 30Mbs with two cities having 50Mbs available. Even in the Utopia cities averages of 33.3Mbs couldn't be reached.
The article has the worst conclusions I've ever seen. They claim Sandy has an average internet speed that doesn't even exist anywhere in sandy unless you are buying at DS3 directly from a telecom company like Qwest or XO. The Akami numbers aren't residential connections, either the study is garbage or the numbers are the average connection an ISP has, not individuals. Even if it were the average connection an ISP has I still don't buy it.
So according to Xmissions website you can get up to a 7mbit DSL line in Sandy from them. In other cities (not Sandy) you can get up to a 50mb connection (for between $80 and $105/mo, so I doubt most people would opt for that).
So all in all Akamai seems to be a little off...
I think the submitter means 32.6 megabits, as there are 1024 kilobits in a megabit.
In the light of some people moderating my above post as "Informative", I find it necessary to get drunk senseless and to run naked around the neighborhood with a pair of log-periodic antennas as antlers, looking for 666Mb/s Wireless Internet reception. I will see you on the news later...
And please vote Orrin Hatch out of office.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I lived in sandy for about a while, and my internet was never that, and no one has speeds anywhere near this average. Think the toip tiered price that people have upgraded to is 9mbs. While I live a few miles away, I still have quite a few friends that live in that area. Besides they don't even have utopia in sandy (I should, where I live now, but its expansion has been blocked by Qwest and Comcast). All the wireless is junk.
The only thing could think of is maybe comcast cache/proxy server is grabbing pages that fast. (we have some DNS Hijacking that was mentioned a few months back.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Its listed at 27.4Mbits. I have a Qwest fiber connection that's 20M/5M, they have a faster packages that offer 40M/5M and 40M/20M (or maybe its only 10M or 12M upload) The only other option is Mediacom cable internet, I'm not sure if the limit there is 12M or 24M.
Either way, like the guy who has family and friends in Sandy, I don't just see where they are getting their numbers. Even if every single Qwest subscriber in town was eligible for the fastest 40M speed (not all areas are covered) and subscribed to it, I'll bet the cable modem subscribers would drive down the average.
The only other thing I can think of is that students in the dorms, who are probably getting at least 100Mb ethernet, are skewing the average....
Cue the Mormon-phobia comments and jokes about magic underwear...
Is that like having a speedometer for your speedometer, to see how fast your speed is?
I posted about this on another forum, where someone mentioned that Qwest offers FIOS service in Sandy. He didn't know the speed, though.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
http://www.utopianet.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_Infrastructure_Agency
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
I posted about this on another forum, where someone mentioned that Qwest offers FIOS service in Sandy. He didn't know the speed, though.
As FIOS is a trademark of verizon, its extremely unlikely that qwest is providing that service and last I heard, verizon has never deployed fios in Utah, anywhere.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Xmission has standard residential UTOPIA bandwidths of 15 Mbit/s and 50 Mbit/s - up and down. The end user links are all 100 Mbit/s Ethernet (over fiber), and you can get a 100 Mbit/s "business" connection if you want.
As other commenters have noted, there is no way this figure applies to Sandy City proper. Sandy does not have a UTOPIA deployment. The real problem, though, is that the Salt Lake valley has a large number of relatively small cities all served by the same local ISPs, and there is no reliable way that Akamai can tell which users are in which local cities to that level of accuracy. The IP addresses don't carry any more information than (roughly) somewhere in the Salt Lake valley. One would have to be in a different for that difference to start to be visible.
Salt Lake City proper isn't a UTOPIA city either, but there are several cities in the valley which are, notably West Valley City, Midvale, and Murray. So what appears is that Akamai estimated the coverage footprint of a local content distribution node (probably the one at Xmission) and estimated that the center of the footprint was in Sandy. Even though no one in Sandy City proper has that kind of bandwidth, people with UTOPIA connection (and there are many in the general vicinity) often do - 50 Mbit/s UTOPIA service is readily available, and inexpensively at that if you live in one of the original UTOPIA cities.
Considering the size of the US in land area, having a 3.9 mbps average isn't that bad.
Is no one else concerned bythe fact that the average speed DECLINED by 2.8%?? Seriously? I mean, I understand our speeds suck. I get it. But they're now declining???? Yes, yes, lotsa people have internet on their phones. Average those in, and speeds will drop. But shouldn't there be an offset by all those new amazing DOCSYS 3.0 and FIOS technologies? I guess not. US connection speeds suck, and these people are proud that they're getting worse. Fuckers.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I though it was the latter at first.
So that's how Utah clinches the title for highest consumption of porn per capita. http://www.onlineeducation.net/porn/
I live in Sandy, UT and the ONLY way to get over 22Mbps is to get Comcast's Extreme 50/10 package which is over $100 a month and it only became available 3 weeks ago. While the median income here is 80k/ year and plenty of people can afford it, I doubt 50% of the 100k people here upgraded to that package in the last 3 weeks. In Sandy, Comcast has 3 subnets you can get assigned to. One of them would only result in 40/6 speedtest results and would never result in uploads over 7.5Mbps. While connections through another gateway would result in 62/12 results. So I changed the Mac address on router until I got connected to the good network. So I've run a few hundred speed tests in the last week. I'm sure others have recently upgraded have been running many speed tests too. As they trouble shoot why they aren't getting the full speed listed they will run even more tests than normal. Which has screwed up the "Average" for results in the area I'm sure.
I just tested my results (speedtest.net)
Download: 32MB
Upload: 1.8MB
Ping: 13ms
Your mileage may vary.
Here's the link: http://www.speedtest.net/result/685154620.png
So you know if Sandy rejected Utopia because the politically active portion are luddites, or because they were bowing to telecom pressure?
> Seriously, once you get to 1 mbit, web browsing is about as good as it gets.
I have 1.360 Mbit/s downstream here. When opening more than one page at a time or when there is more than one person surfing, you notice delays. Pretty much everyone I know has at least 10 Mbit/s, most have 16 Mbit/s, at work, I have between 40 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s depending on usage and the server on the other side.
So, being able to compare the two on a daily basis, it _does_ matter.
PS: Obviously, bash.org loads faster than a picture-heavy site. If everyone were to surf with links, 1 Mbit/s would be plenty.
PPS: I don't do youtube and similar at all, let alone HD.
Reading the comments, on this page, of people who have _lived there_ I would say you are ranting without even the uttermost basic research.
Comcast offers 20 Mbit/s, xmission offers 100 Mbit/s.
PS: It's nice to see that you can get to +5 Informative on /. with no knowlegde about the topic at hand ;)
It wouldn't surprise me if this was deliberate misinformation. The FCC has been asking for submissions for their stimulus fund allotment of 7.5 billion for high speed internet across the states. A lot of people have been complaining about existing coverage, or leaving comments like 'hey, let's also get the 200-300 billion the telco's have already gotten paid for broadband rollout but have failed to deliver'. Now here comes a really good stat showing one city is well on its way to being true broadband.
If I was a resident I would bitch to the FCC, congress critters, media, anyone I could think of about this. Any chance of stimulus funds for broadband have disappeared with this study. Also the local telco can chalk this area up as a 'broadband delivered' area.
Just a theory but with the dollar figures involved, and telcos being well... telcos... I wouldn't trust them in the slightest.
Except Utopia, which offers last mile fiber to the home at 50mbps up 50 mbps down. When I had Utopia in Orem, UT that particular connection cost $50/mo.
You don't buy a connection from Utopia though, you'll need to find a carrier in your neighborhood. I'd try Xmission - because they're awesome.
Some of the other comments say that Utopia is not available in Sandy specifically, but that doesn't change the fact that Utah is home to the fastest available residential connections. Sandy might just be the "average" location for those high speed connections, even though they don't offer Utopia themselves.
or else!