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

Hmmmm...

[OrwellianLurker]

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.

Re:Hmmmm...

[hedwards]

That would be a false dilemma. They should all be held to higher standards than what they're held to presently. The reason they aren't is that right wing nutters cry ZOMG Washington elitzor controlling us whenever somebody proposes doing something about it. I swear this country has the worst blame the victim mentality of just about anywhere. What's worse is we actually have the things to actually fix it. But we won't because ZOMG Washington elitzors controlling us.

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.

[drachenstern]

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!"...

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[not flu]

I was under the impression that there were people in the US with no house, too.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[pesho]

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.

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.

[0racle]

Verizon FIOS tops at 50Mbit/20Mbit down/up for $139/month according to their site.

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. ... KDDI will charge 5,985 yen in basic monthly fees for Internet and telephone services, down 1,155 yen from the current price."

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.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[twoallbeefpatties]

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.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[EdIII]

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.

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.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[mcrbids]

Compare the United States to Canada, which has less population density than the United States and generally higher connection speeds.

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").

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[Solandri]

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.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[Chowderbags]

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.

Re:Disclaimer: I am an unabashed American.

[cruff]

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.

Re:Good but still not complete

[Kenoli]

$100/month apparently.

NOT Speedtest.com, Pingtest.com

[pgn674]

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.

What cool content are you using bandwidth for? TV?

[billstewart]

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.

What?

[ratboy666]

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.

All right, let's do a fair comparison

[Atmchicago]

So then compare Canada with the Northeast Corridor (Boston, New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware, Baltimore, DC, Richmond).