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Global "Last Mile" Performance Stats Going Public
Ookla, the company behind Speedtest.net, Pingtest.net, and the bandwidth testing apps deployed at many ISPs, has gone public with Net performance stats from 1.5 billion users (and counting). Their Net Index page displays download speed, upload speed, and connection "quality" from the EU and the G8, to countries, worldwide cities, and US states. Beginning today, the company is also making detailed (anonymized) data available to academics. "Ookla will also start surveying users about how much they pay for broadband and how much bandwidth they were promised by their ISPs. The results of those questions will go into building a Value Index, which will show how much people around the world pay per megabit-per-second for Internet access. In addition, by collecting postal codes from Speedtest users, Ookla hopes to map broadband service to local economic conditions, Apgar said. The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."
The addresses are Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net. And yeah, I checked to make sure I got the capitalization correct.
speedtest.com is a squatter, and pingtest.com redirects to bandwidthplace.com, which looks awfully shady. Whois says it was registered by proxy, the Better Business Bureau has no record on that phone number, and neither does Google.
Verizon FIOS tops at 50Mbit/20Mbit down/up for $139/month according to their site.
...
KDDI will charge 5,985 yen in basic monthly fees for Internet and telephone services, down 1,155 yen from the current price."
Now compare that to this from Japan.
"KDDI Corp will launch a fiber-optic communications service with upload and download speeds each of up to one gigabit per second on Oct 1.
Yes, they said lowering the price. XE converts 5,985 yen to $66.29 USD. $66 for 1Gbit compared to $139 for 50Mbit.
In everything, from the bottom all the way to the top, American internet speeds and price absolutely suck.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The vast majority of Canada is unpopulated or sparsely populated. 90% of Canadians live in a 200 km strip along the U.S. border. Distance from Vancouver to Halifax is 4443 km, giving a 200 km strip an area of 888,600 sq km (which includes a lot of water, but ignore that). Canada's population is 33.2 million, 90% of that is 29.8 million. So 90% of Canadians live in a population density of 33.5 ppl / sq km. The U.S. has a population density of 32.1 ppl / sq km.
From net index site, the U.S. has an average connection speed of 10.16 Mbps. Canada has an average connection speed of 7.89 Mbps.