US Adoption of 10 Mbps+ Broadband Nearly Doubles In a Year

darthcamaro writes "We all know that the U.S. doesn't have the fastest broadband in the world, but it is gaining 'fast' (pun intended). The latest Akamai State of the Internet report pegs U.S. adoption of High Broadband, that is, broadband with access of 10 Mbps, at 15 percent. While that number may not seem high, it's 95 percent higher than it was this time last year." Broad-stroke averages, though, mean less than whether your neck of the woods gets better Internet service.

Comments

Average != Median

[MetricT]

I was reading about this on another site, and the average was reported as 6.7 Mbs, but 60% of users were 4 Mbs or below, which means that the median user is getting around half the speed of the average user.

The average is a poor statistic for measuring bandwidth. It's like putting 9 hobos and Bill Gates in a room and saying that on average everyone is a millionaire.

Re:The numbers

[cpu6502]

Mine is 1 Mbit/s. By choice. That's because I have never spent more then $19.99 for internet, and I don't want to start now. And yes I do stream video over that connection. It works just fine.

A friend of mine didn't have broadband for a long time, and was stuck on dialup, but just got it a year ago. The gaps are slowly being filled in.

Re:Tied with the EU

[Anonymous Coward]

According to TFA the US is #12 in average connection speed, at 6,7 Mbps. There are just two countries in double digits: South Korea at 15.7 and Japan at 10.9.

So even if you compare only across similar sized counries your numbers can't be correct.

Re:The numbers

[Urza9814]

I just moved into a new apartment in Pawtucket, RI and the SLOWEST internet available to me (other than dial-up...if you can do dial-up via cable or FiOS -- I don't have phone lines...) is 15/5. I decided to go up one level and get 50/25. It's nice on the rare occasion that I'm hitting servers that will actually deliver those speeds, but that's not really all that often.

is that real broadband or cell co broadband?

[datapharmer]

I am curious how much of this availability is due to high speed cellular, which while perfectly fast is pretty much useless due to ridiculous data caps. My choices at home are cellular, dial-up, or satellite. Satellite latency sucks, cellular latency is fine but the 5GB data cap is horrible and dial-up is well.... dial-up. I would hardly consider myself as connected to high speed broadband, but does this study count me as such?

Who cares?

[CubicleZombie]

Whatever gets me Netflix in high res is fast enough. As for general use, 384k DSL was fast enough. Everything else is just a marketing game between Verizon and Comcast, as far as I'm concerned.

I would like it to be cheaper. Any way you slice it, it's over $100/month for high speed internet. That's IF you can get it. I know a lot of people who are still stuck with Dialup, even in the Washington D.C. suburbs.

Re:Tied with the EU

[cpu6502]

>>>your numbers can't be correct

(1) Mbps is not an SI standard measurement. Its use is incorrect. (2) Take-up your complaint with speedtest.net. They are the ones who have tested literally billions of connections. I am more inclined to believe people who did ACTUAL up and downloads over actual lines, then this study which appears to pull its numbers out of thin air. (BTW speedtest says Japan is approximately 22 Mbit/s and Korea is # 1 at 26 Mbit/s.)

Re:Google Fiber? Sonic.net?

[QuantumRiff]

I used to admin at a small college (about 1000 students, 25 classrooms) .. about 5 years ago when I left, we had 4MB of transit to the internet (we had 100MB to other universities in the state, we were all on one big network)

Students would come in, and tell us how fast our internet was, and that their 5Mb cable modems were nothing in comparison.. They were shocked to find out that we only had 4Mb. We had a squid transparent proxy box, but the big difference was latency. A very, very low latency, slower connection will 'feel' much faster than a bigger pipe. People think a 100k web page coming back instantly is because they're on a big pipe. But it can come back just as fast over a 1Mb pipe, latency is the difference.