The Fastest ISPs In the US

adeelarshad82 writes "PCMag recently put Internet browsing speeds to the test to see which ISP was the fastest. The results were based on a quarter million tests run between May 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, by more than 6,000 users. The tests were carried out using SurfSpeed, which takes into account the complete, real-world download time of a web page to a browser. According to the results, Verizon's FiOS took the top spot as the nation's fastest ISP, with a SurfSpeed score of 1.23 Mbps. Interestingly though, of all the regions where Verizon's FiOS is available, its dominance is only seen in the northeast and the west, whereas cable service from Cox and Comcast won out in the southern region. Moreover, cable through Cox and Optimum Online beat AT&T's fiber optic service in the nationwide results, with SurfSpeeds of 1.14Mbps, 1.12Mbps, and 1.06Mbps respectively. The worst results mostly consisted of DSL providers, bottoming out at 544 Kbps from Frontier and going up to 882Kbps by Earthlink. Other interesting facts noted in the test were that broadband penetration was highest in Rhode Island and lowest in Mississippi, while the average Internet bill was highest in Delaware and lowest in Arkansas."

Comments

I said goodbye to speakeasy this year

[t0qer]

Even though Speakeasy was slashdot recommended, a lot of my geek friends used it, I had to cut them this year.

I never got the advertised speed out of them for what I was paying. My business was close to the CO, but when I'd complain their answer would always be "Replace the wire going from the pole into your building"

Why should I have to do that? I'm old, I hurt when I fall. NO thanks.

So after 6 years with SE, I called up Comcast. They sent an installer who made sure everything was working right. My speeds were out of sight, 20mbps down and 5mbps up. My bill is $20@mo less too.

DSL can compete, but they have to give up a little margin for better customer service.

"SurfSpeed" not a measure of bandwidth

[Josh Triplett]

Despite using bandwidth units (Mbps), their "SurfSpeed" "benchmark" actually depends heavily on latency, as it tries to simulate a web browser fetching resources sequentially from a site as it discovers them.

Found this report analyzing the article and the benchmark: http://blog.ookla.com/2010/06/23/the-fastest-isps-not-quite/

Re:"SurfSpeed" not a measure of bandwidth

[Josh Triplett]

According to the article I linked to, they access a grand total of 10 sites: microsoft.com, aol.com, ebay.com, msn.com, google.com, yahoo.com, mapquest.com, go.com, apple.com, and myspace.com.

On the one hand, I'd expect none of those sites to have a slower connection than any consumer ISP. (Some sites with large files such as video sites will throttle for bandwidth reasons, but no sane site throttles HTML and similar; better to just serve the files quickly and close the connection.)

On the other hand, that doesn't look like a particularly representative sample of "top" sites. Who uses mapquest anymore? And how often does the average user visit microsoft.com or apple.com? (As opposed to msn.com or live.com, which seem somewhat more likely for regular visits. Windows Update doesn't count, since *hopefully* that gets much more non-interactive use than interactive use. Similarly for the various Apple services, which don't necessarily live on the same server as apple.com.)

But in any case, the bandwidth of the server will matter less to SurfSpeed than the latency of responding to each request quickly so it can start the next one.

The concept of a benchmark for real-world site load times seems perfectly reasonable, but it should not have a misleading unit of "Mbps". A better idea: measure the total number of milliseconds required for page loads during some representative real-world browsing paths (*not* just site front pages either).

Re:Mississippi

[Mitsoid]

Yes, you can buy higher speed and thus invalidate the 'findings' of the article... Which is really just self-promotion with a fancy title to attract attention.

I was kinda disappointed that the article doesn't address maximum speed, or average speed amongst all "5mbps" connections, instead it lumps in DSL, Cable, and Fiber and says "HEY LoOk! Fiber is usually faster!!"

What this is really testing is "How much speed do Americans purchase, by region,"... it's just.. almost.. completely useless... except for a few statistical data points that are not frequently mentioned (broadband penetration by state).. We're comparing ISP by what the end-users paid for, as opposed to what end users CAN pay for (i.e. the limit of the technology)... or, as an alternative test, they could have tested Like-speed connections average performance across carriers, but instead they are grouping DSL, Fiber, and Cable..... and ignoring that some people pay $20 for internet while others want to pay $50 (for semi-basic home internet service) and claiming an ISP is "The best" because they have more users that spend more money on internet. (or they have less users but much higher speed to result in the same data skewing of results).

So yeah, Metrics, IMO, are mostly crap. And Mississippi can pull ahead of every state in this 'survey' simply by spending an extra $5... hell for $10 extra you can probably get speeds 5 times faster then most of the United States!

Re:Only 1.23 Mbps?

[zero0ne]

I have FioS @ 25/25, and I can EASILY get to that max on a normal basis:

STEAM download: ~3MB/s
ISO download from MSDN site (bizspark license): ~2.6MB/s

Clearly browsing an actual site is going to go slower, as you have to take into account a lot more things since it just isn't one large file.

However, did these results take into account video streaming? game playing, etc etc? All of those things would run well above that 2Mbps streaming HD content.