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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 Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."
I wonder if we'll give away billions to ISPs without getting anything in return again.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
It's been my experience from various locales that the US really is that far behind the curve. I've friends around the world and when we discuss speeds/cost they seem amazed if they've never heard our rates before. Rather pathetic at times. Ah well, life goes on.
Just remember, if this is what we have to complain about, are we doing so poorly? There are people around the world with no house at this very moment, due to lack of sufficient infrastructure, and our complaint is "my intertubes is too slows!"...
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Oh, yeah, we definitely won that Cold War.
No, I think we lost the Corporate America looks only to squeeze the most profit out of consumers war. I expect the push for short term investor returns overrides the long term investment required for providing good service.
I'm pretty sure this study wildly and unpredictably overestimates the average available broandband speed. Not too many people know how to test their download bandwidth, and only people with specific need to check their bandwidth will do so. It also doesn't differentiate between mobile and fixed broadband speeds, which should affect the numbers significantly.
All in all, I really don't think this means anything. It could be possible to use it as a comparative tool by assuming that the proportion of internet savvy geeks is the same across the world, but I have no idea if that assumption is correct.
I just hope that no politician is going to use this data for anything serious.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I was under the impression that there were people in the US with no house, too.
$100/month apparently.
Yes it is. Based on my experience in US and EU (including some of the East European countries that score high on the list), US is an expensive dump as far as internet access goes. The reason: there is competition and free enterprise out there unlike US. If you go in one of these eastern europe countries you get to choose from DSL, WiMAX, Cable and even ethernet cable strung from the local 'mom & pop' garage operation.
But, if you take the EU in toto as a similar size to the US, they are virtually tied. 10.02 v 10.16. Some places great, some not so much.
Could it be better? Hells yeah. But this is not the 3rd world backwater that many in here like to proclaim.
The U.S. generally considers itself to be technologically advanced compared to other nations and believes that it helps to drive our economy and keep people in their houses. If it were to turn out that we actually aren't the best in the world at technological issues... well, actually, we'll probably just deny it and say that we are and whine about our lack of population density making it hard to build more infrastructure.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
hehe, I actually thought it was by now well established that we're rather skewered on our technical prowess. We just happen to have a lot of servers in this country (so greater proportion of the internet than we deserve?), and we can play with the global monetary system since we control Wall Street. Otherwise, I see other countries out innovate us all the time. I'm rather afraid of our position slipping to number 6 or 15 or something globally before I retire (many years away).
Oh and I should mention that it's our lack of population density that ... ;)
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Oh and I should mention that it's our lack of population density that ... ;)
If there is a Discussion of U.S. Internet Drinking Game, rule #1 is, "Every time someone says the words 'population density,' take a shot."
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
The reason to have high bandwidth is to do cool stuff with it. 14kbps was fine for email, then 384 for average web, then 1.5M for Napster and gaming, 3 Mbps seems to be plenty to run YouTube and BitTorrent.
The carriers that want to sell me high-speed connections are doing it so they can sell me television, and I've got plenty of television already. When Napster was new, the public position of the cable modem companies was "Content Thieves are EEEVIL", but if you talked to them privately, most of them had enough clue to say "Dude, Napster's the reason people are buying cable modems, we love it!" But these days they don't have anything new and cool to offer, and they're cluelessly talking about bandwidth caps and no-servers-at-home policies to make sure nobody develops anything new or cool.
So what are you doing with your bandwidth that's interesting? I've heard that old people in Korea can use it to look at video from their local grocery store to see what's on sale, but I haven't heard of anything else interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, maybe 3Mbps may be enough for Youtube, but it's not enough to preload a Youtube movie while I listen to KRTU and both Bittorrent and aptitude run in the background - especially if mine is not the only PC in the house.
But my problem is not downstream (10 Mbps is enough for now), my problem is upstream; I have a home server that hosts my movies so I can watch them when I'm anywhere with my laptop, but my upstream can't even keep up with DVD quality playback. I always have to wait for it to download for a very long time before I can start playing, and meanwhile I'm killing all the internet access for people in my house.
Dilbert RSS feed
What part about that is untrue though?
People love to bring up Japan and South Korea and how fast their infrastructure is, but I don't see why it is not valid to bring up the disparities in size and population density.
South Korea is about the size of Kentucky with much higher population density and Japan is 90% of the size of California with roughly about %50 more population density.
Our Internet here is made up a number of competing telecoms and transit/peering agreements work great..... but when you have to keep putting fiber runs that are longer than the entire countries of South Korea and Japan why is it any big surprise that bandwidth costs more in the US?
I think it is just a fact that in order to connect up our urban areas with fiber to each other we have to make significantly longer runs to pull it off with less potential sources of revenue per mile of fiber than countries that are apparently "better than us".
It's not about national pride or some ego competition here. I just think you can't compare the US with other countries on a 1:1 basis. Especially when in some countries they are already started out with the new technology.
I think for what we have to work with we are doing pretty damn good. Our big problems stem from corruption, lack of competition, and Big Media trying to own the pipes and the content being pushed on it.
Even if all of "that" was fixed tomorrow we would still be faced with huge fiber runs all across the country that need to be made in order to keep up with demand.
Internet is not just the only issue either. The fragile state of our Interstates and bridges also has size and density a factor in them too. I am much less impressed with Germany having an awesome Autobahn system given their size compared to us. Now if the US had an Autobahn system? Wow.
That's some very excellent insight.
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I don't think you're asking me, but let's assume you are. Most of our family doesn't live here, so I would be using it to keep in touch with them. Additionally I do web development, and would love to be able to work from home.
However, that doesn't fit the mold of what you're describing, because that's a consumer centric purpose. You're describing "what does the vendor get out of it". Because that's what they are everywhere but the US. Vendors. Here, they're providers. Slight difference of name, the difference being in other places the intent is to sell pipe, because there's lots of competition. I visited the south of France last year for two weeks, and I could tell that there was no dearth of competition for home IP service in that short time frame.
However, here in the US, most localities are lucky to have two competing providers (granted, using separate tech often so that each tech only has one local provider).
I like the point. I'm gonna have to remember to bring that up more often in this discussion when I have it with other people.
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I keep having that reaction... Did you not READ the fine article?
The speed test is pretty much "point to point". In my neighbourhood, it is between Scarborough Ontario and Markham Ontario (Canada).
The speed tester automatically picks the nearest server for you, even.
So, it DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG THE COUNTRY IS. Peering arrangements shouldn't be coming into it either.
By all that is holy, I would expect San Jose to have some damn fine speeds.
I am embarrassed that the Scarborough speeds are so slow.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Compare the United States to Canada, which has less population density than the United States and generally higher connection speeds.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Do you want a new line strung across your front yard everytime Joe Blow next door wants a new ISP?
Yes. The utility easement should not be used for the exclusive benefit of three handpicked monopolies.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So then compare Canada with the Northeast Corridor (Boston, New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware, Baltimore, DC, Richmond).
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
The U.S. has a population density of 32.1 ppl / sq km.
Well, if you're excluding unpopulated or sparsely-populated regions in Canada, you should extend the same courtesy to the USA, though.
Mean population density is meaningless for this sort of thing. What you really need is a median of sorts: for every citizen (or resident, or whatever), compute the population density of the area they live in, and then take the average (mean) of *those*.
Of course, that's assuming you're not just looking for a way to pat yourself on the shoulder and being able to continue believing you're really number one, no matter what everyone is saying.
Then dump Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, large portions of Texas, some of the very large state and national parks, etc from the US estimates. If every city up and down the east and west coast were saturated with 100 Mb/s with most inland areas getting only 10 Mb/s with only the really remote and inhospitable areas not getting good service (yeah, you're probably not going to see great speed in inland Alaska for the foreseeable future), then we could say that we're doing really well. But we're not. We've got an aging infrastructure that didn't get updated due to all sorts of greed and we'll pay the price for it eventually.