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..."

Comments

The US looks pretty terrible.

[Miros]

US is not in the top 10, couple of cities in the top 50 of those for download, none in upload? Is the USA really that far behind the curve, or is there another explanation?

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[v1]

The US's upload speed has always stunk. Makes it impractical for most casual admins to run a small private server for friends or even personal use. Stinks when you want to remote to your house to grab a file, where you have 20mbps downstream, and only 768kbps upstream and it just takes forever to grab the file.

Or you can get your wallet totally shafted by your isp if they do offer higher tiers of upstream. Double your speed usually triples to quadruples your monthly cost, and you're usually starting from dirt. (256k to at best 2m)

I pay three times the usual rate at my house because I want their "premium" 2mbps (1.5 actual) instead of the totally useless 384k. (and that's with 10-20m down being standard)

That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[mikael_j]

Ok, so how come us Swedes mostly started to go online in the mid-90s (using regular old dialup), then everyone but the college students who were on 10 Mbps SUNET connections switched to ADSL (at that time mostly g.dmt) or DOCSIS connections, then "everyone" switched to ADSL2+ and the DOCSIS networks began to disappear (except ComHem who kept upping the speed of their network to stay competitive) and the whole time fiber connections have become more and more common (ten years ago 10/10 Mbps was the "standard" for what you could get with a fiber connection, today it's 100/100 Mbps with some people having access to 1000/1000 Mbps)?

By your reasoning we should all still be stuck on dialup or first-gen (g.dmt) ADSL. Especially when you consider our low population density...

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[mikael_j]

The EU is not a nation, most ISPs do not freely operate across the borders of different European countries (although some do operate in neighboring countries, like Telenor in Sweden and Norway and TeliaSonera in Finland and Sweden).

Also, by lumping all of Europe together you're basically trying to lower the higher speeds of some countries by throwing them in with low performers like Greece, Spain and Italy (I don't think most europeans needed netindex.com to know that these guys have fairly crappy internet infrastructure, anyone who's ever been there on vacation could tell you that, to paraphrase a description of Italy from a swede who went there a few years ago "Italy is like being in the dark ages with mopeds and indoor plumbing that occasionally works, I will never understand how these people made it into the G8").