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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.'"
MBA's are even more expensive than engineers - probably just replaced the lot with a bunch of minimum-wage high school drop-outs.
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
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.
They got broadband connections in San D'oria? Damn you, Elvaans!
Signed, pissed off Bastokan.
You are clearly not familiar with the Ivy-league MBAs' legendary record in the area of improvement of long-term profitability of any activity they are involved in. Exorbitant wages are a key component of their "magic" and an essential element in the strategy of maximizing the aforementioned profit.
Seriously, can we please try to remember that this Internet thing is a global medium?
...perhaps at the same time, we can try to remember that Slashdot is an American site, and the majority of readers are American.
Correction, Sandy *had* the fastest speed. Sorry folks, they've just been slashdotted.
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.
I'm trying to figure out what part of Sandy has an average connection speed of 33.5 Mbps, as the article says. Sandy declined to join up with Utopia, and nobody else offers fiber optic that I'm aware of. Comcast's average subscription is most certainly not their 30Mbps nor 50Mbps offering (and even if it is, nobody actually gets that rated speed), Qwest's DSL doesn't go that fast, and... who else even *offers* internet service there?
What am I missing?
Maybe it's a typo for 3.35Mbps?
(I used to live in Sandy, my parents live there, and several of my friends live there. None of my friends know where this 33.5Mbps number came from either.)
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.
I lived in Sandy up to last year (and still live nearby), and the best I could get without going to comcast was 3mbit DSL. Comcast offered up to 8mbit, iirc. Definitely nothing above 10 was even available on a residential plan. Has to be a typo.
Then how about a recently published top ten list of the countries with the fastest broad band?
As of around September of last year, Qwest started offering fiber connections in Sandy. My father in law has been looking at getting it. It's also available up here in Bountiful and throughout much of Salt Lake City.
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
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.
Really? You have statistics about the nationality of Slashdot readers? Please, do present your findings to the class.
Comcast offers 30 and 50 Mbit connections in my parents' neighborhood, but nobody I know actually subscribes to anything higher than 12Mbps or so.
According to Qwest.com, the fastest connection they offer anywhere is 20Mbps, so that can't be raising the average as high as they say it is... and they only offer up to 12Mbps at my parents' house.
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...
we can try to remember that Slashdot is an American site
In terms of ownership and editorial staff, yes, although not so much in terms of news coverage
and the majority of readers are American.
Last statistics I saw showed more than 50% non-US readers. The US made up the larges single block, but it was not an overall majority.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hey, I saved you the effort - go to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org where you'll find that Americans comprise 47.1% of Slashdot visitors. While they are the largest single block, they do not comprise "the majority".
Please check your facts, you arrogant Yankee imperialist running dog.
Actually, I think that the ADSL in that most of that area is capable of 40 Mb Down/20 Mb up. I've personally seen it.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. ~ Thomas H. Huxley
Majority means more than 50%.
Alexa reckons 47% of Slashdot visitors are from the USA.
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
Just so its clear, its not fiber to the house like Verizon FIOS, its actually fiber to the neighborhood (in my case a node about 2500 ft away) and then VDSL2 over POTS to the house.
Majority means more than 50%.
Alexa reckons 47% of Slashdot visitors are from the USA.
"The Alexa Toolbar, an application produced by Alexa Internet, is a Browser Helper Object for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows that is used by Alexa to measure website statistics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Toolbar
Hmm, yeah I'd totally agree, using Alexa to determine the viewership of slashdot is 100% viable.
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.
From which company? My dad would be interested.
If they're including a data center in the consumer average, they're doing something horribly wrong.
that is odd, I was starting to think it was a British site. I keep on seeing a disproportionately number of stories about the UK government doing crazy oppressive fascist shit. Or may be there is another reason for that......
wasn't sandy the FIRST place to get utopia? like 2 years go?
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.
Comcast offers 30 and 50 Mbit connections in my parents' neighborhood, but nobody I know actually subscribes to anything higher than 12Mbps or so.
With their 256GB/month cap, it would be stupid to pay for the higher bandwidth.
50Mbps would let you hit the cap in about 12 hours. Yippee!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Nope.
Best I can do in a quick google is some city council minutes from 2008 where a few city residents voiced support for Utopia and wanted to know why Sandy City didn't participate.
Waddya mean offtopic? As a "friend" of the content/communications cartels, you can bet he's one of the larger impediments to real wide open high speed internet access.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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.
Discover Card also has a relatively large call center / data center there
I wonder if those sorts of users show up in the statistics
Yeah, when I lived in Provo I paid $43/month for 15Mbps symmetric fiber, and I loved it.
I live in Seattle now, and I have to settle for Comcast :(
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.
Are their figures based on the highest available consumer broadband speeds available, the average advertised speeds of real customers, or the average obtained speeds of real customers?
Comcast offers 50/10 speeds in many locations, and Verizon offers 50/20 in most locations where FiOS is available. So, it's hard to believe that some small town in Utah has the fastest available speeds. It is however true that almost nobody subscribes to these speeds as they cost $100-140/mo and you don't get any price reductions for using their TV and phone services. Most people subscribe to the lowest or middle level of service. For example, I have Verizon's 25/15 FiOS, which in reality is 25/20. Its advertised at $65/mo but when combined with their TV service, it really comes to around $50/mo. It just doesn't make sense to jump to 50/20.
Are their figures based on the highest available consumer broadband speeds available, the average advertised speeds of real customers, or the average obtained speeds of real customers?
I read TFA, which doesn't link to the actual report, and saw no indication of what their data is based on.
"...perhaps at the same time, we can try to remember that Slashdot is an American site, and the plurality of readers are American."
Satisfied?
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.
Let me have a go at it...
"The only pr0n the Mormons download is kiddie pr0n."
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress.
Mozy uses data centers all over Utah.
There is not a data center in Sandy that I am aware of.
Alexa reckons 47% of Slashdot visitors are from the USA.
That essentially means, 47% of the readers infected by Alexa are from the US. I wouldn't tout that too loudly if I was from the US...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No it doesn't. Majority means the highest percentage. If 47% of the readers of Slashdot are from the US, you then carve the remaining percentage across every other country. Unless another country makes up another 47% and the remaining 6% is spread across the rest of the globe, the US makes up the majority of readers on Slashdot.
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?
(I used to live in Sandy, my parents live there, and several of my friends live there. None of my friends know where this 33.5Mbps number came from either.)
The answer appears to be here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1513498&cid=30795322
No it doesn't. Majority means the highest percentage
Actually, no. That would be a plurality. A majority is a subset of a group that is more than half the group.
> 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 ;)
yeah, lets break that sentence down and see where they went wrong, shall we?
The Alexa Toolbar (yeah, because we all know that nerds just love to have a load of stupid toolbars. I send my more clueless friends to ninite just to make sure they do NOT get"toolbar"ed), an application produced by Alexa Internet (don't care, don't use, uninstall on every box that crosses my path and every new build), is a Browser Helper Object (Spyware! Oh HELL no!) for Internet Explorer (BWA HA HA HA! Yeah, like nerds are gonna use THAT POS!) on Microsoft Windows (Uhhhh...how many Linux and OSX nerds we got here? Hell of a lot more than average)
So I think we have logically proven that going by Alexa stats on THIS site is about as accurate as pulling the numbers out of my hairy southern butt. While I have no doubt we have plenty of overseas users, just the fact that something as totally pointless as Alexa says 47% USA would make me believe that the number is closer to 70%+, simply because nerds avoid IE, don't like or allow BHOs, Run FF/Chrome/Opera/Safari, and a hell of a lot of guys here use Linux and/or OSX. So yeah, I'm thinking the USA is the most populous user of our little site. While Alexa might be good to see who uses the Food Network, for a geek site? Not so much. The 47% is probably those poor bastards trapped on IE6 at work. Poor souls.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
just the fact that something as totally pointless as Alexa says 47% USA would make me believe that the number is closer to 70%+, simply because nerds avoid IE [...]
Why 70%? Why not 30%, or 90%?
You seem to be suggesting American nerds are less likely than non-American nerds to have Alexa installed.
(If anything, the reverse is true, as Firefox/Opera/Safari etc are more popular outside the USA.)
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!