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

[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.

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.