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

The numbers

[MyLongNickName]

I tend to doubt the numbers, but have nothing to base it on but my gut feel and conversations with people I know. I personally have access to "High Broadband", but am perfectly happy with my average 5Mbps as my typical use case doesn't involve a lot of video download. I'd much rather have symetrical 2Mbps for backing up purposes. 10Mbps would have very little benefit for me, and certainly not another $360/yr benefit.

YMMV and probably does.

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.

Google Fiber? Sonic.net?

[neelwebs]

10 mbps isn't enough. I want a gigabit!

Re:Google Fiber? Sonic.net?

[MyLongNickName]

I remember when we got a T1 line at the school of business at my university. That was freaking fast baby and worth the $5,000 or so it cost a month (not sure on the price... I heard it second hand). Now 1.5Mbps is considered slow for residential (though I'd like the symetrical speeds over what cable provides). I cannot even imagine gigabit at home. What would that be for? When you want to get streaming netflix videoes on every TV in your house plus every fridge, oven and toaster?

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.

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: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.

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.