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For Fast Internet in the US, Virginia Tops the Charts
According to data gathered by Akamai, an analysis from Broadview Networks comes to the conclusion that the top five U.S. states for broadband speed are Virginia (at the top of the list, with an average transfer speed of 13.78 Mbps), Delaware, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Washington, with Washington, D.C. slightly edging out the similarly-named state; Alaska comes in dead last. These are average speeds, though, and big states have more variation to account for, including connections in the hinterlands. You could still have a fast connection in Chattanooga, or be stuck on dial-up in the Texas panhandle.
Fastest post
Why UNIX?
I sometimes forget there are two of them. I was thinking there for a moment that the neighbors finally got an upgrade.
Ezekiel 23:20
from New York. Where's the slowpokes from Virginia?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Hell we have faster than that in in Clarksville, Tennessee :) with reasonably decent prices. Oh ya we have Municipal Fiber to the Home
50mbps - $44.95
100mbps - $69.96
200mpbs - $89.95
1000mbps - $249.95
You can get triple pack with 175 TV channels, phone, and 50mbps internet for $118 a month.
And these are not special offer prices. They just bumped everyone's speeds up by 2x and they have yet to raise prices. Speeds are bidirectional so you get the same up as down. They are a Netflix open connect partner, and you actually get the speeds they promise! Go CDE Lightband!
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Will we be waiting till 2050 to get FTTH?
See the problem is that with the exception of Hawaii and Alaska, there is absolutely no reason for any of the lower-48 to have as crappy internet as it does. Everyone should have 100mbps by now, but none of the primary ISP's see it that way. They see it as a cash grab to charge more for higher bandwidth and then throw a usage cap on top so nobody actually uses it.
The best thing that can come out of the government regulations is to tell the carriers that they must offer bandwidth capacity (in Mbits) or usage caps, but not both on the same plan. (eg if I pay for 1Gbit, I should be allowed to run anything I damn well please on it including using 2357TB of data.) The capped data plans should be the low end of the spectrum but still silently connected at 1Gbit. When the cap is at 99% drop the physical connection speed to 0.1Mbit.
Most people who ever used Dialup will remember the speed differential between dialup and ADSL/Cable. Pages crawling down and such.
Here I am, in downtown Richmond (capital of Virginia). I *should* be getting some blazing-fast internet, right? Perfect conditions for it.
Nope. 3Mbps DSL. I can't switch ISPs because my apartment gave a monopoly to Telcom Communications (seriously, that's their actual name - they seem to be reselling CenturyLink). Sure, they don't call it that, but I checked every ISP and none of them will provide service to me except some DSL that's just as slow as what I've got.
And yet my parents, living twenty minutes away from anywhere in the empty part of Chesterfield, are getting 50Mbps FttH. I really want to see the economic explanation for that - it's too expensive to run fiber literally a block from Main Street, but a 20-mile run past several farms and lumber fields is somehow profitable.
I'm sure it's Seattle that skews the charts, cause here I am in the middle of a town of 30k people stuck with 3m/896k 95ms.
For those who are not familiar with the area, the performance numbers of Northern Virginia (aka. NoVa and the 'Silicon Valley of the East') greatly skew the results. Outside of the immediate Washington D.C. area and possibly Norfolk, broadband selections are like the rest of the country: Fair, poor, and non-existent. The real issue at hand is larger than Virginia, though - this is really about rural broadband vs. urban/suburban broadband availability. Due to the size of the country and the terrain, deploying rural broadband (far beyond the reach of metropolitan POPs) is not as simple as trenching a yard for FTTH. Hopefully this will change as long-reach wireless technology becomes more ubiquitous and affordable..
The survey should have been done by zip code or something approximating actual the size of ISP service areas / local government granted monopolies.
OH yeah, Virgina... That makes sense.
Fortunately, we here in your neighboring Free State of North Carolina elected a legislature that was willing to protect us from the predatory pricing of municipal broadband.
Well, we elected them, but the big telephone and cable companies did provide a little financial incentive to help keep them honest, as it were.
Where I live in VA the internet options are HORRIBLE. Verizon DSL has a complete monopoly on the area, charging over $40/month for speeds of only 2.5mbps. Their customer service is on par with Cox cable any time my internet has issues it's a 2-3 month hassle to get it finally fixed, last time I had to contact the BBB in order to get my issues resolved. Worse thing is from what I hear Fiber has been run through the area it's just not being used, I guess Verizon doesn't want to provide faster internet when everybody is left with the choice of dial up or over priced DSL through them.
First Post!
Since fiber is so much faster than typical internet connectivity it really skews these results.
If there is one 1GBit user per 99 1MBit it is pretty misleading to state the average as 10.99MBit.
From what I've seen, there are roughly 4 tiers of access:
No access
up to 1.5MBit
up to 50Mbit
1GBit+
Since their average is in the 10MBit range, I suspect there are large numbers of people in the 1.5 bucket getting skewed by 50 and 1GBit people.
has the best to home internet? I wonder why that would be. What on earth is in that area that would require huge amounts of bandwidth, such large amounts that even the leftovers would raise the average speed in the area? Yeah, I wonder.
Wow i knew our USA internet was terrible but 13 mbps? Are you shitting me? We have 108 mbps in houston and even that sucks balls.
In Switzerland the slowest speeds you commonly get are about 15 Mbits/s, but one thing I really like is that UPC Cablecom offer 2 Mbits/s down for *free* so if you're unemployed or in financial straights you still have access to the internet that's sufficient for doing things like looking for a job, paying your bills, etc. In England, on the other hand, if they think you're not doing enough to search for work they cut you off unemployment benefits. They in effect killed someone this way recently.
soylentnews.org
Internet speed inversely proportionate by distance from washington dc :P
These numbers are pretty meaningless. California is far too large to average numbers across the whole state, same with other large states.
You can get 120 mb/s in Los Altos for cheap, but good luck getting anything in the hills near Shasta or Tahoe.
I live less than a mile from the tallest building in Seattle in a neighborhood named Capitol Hill, and I have 896 kbps DSL at home. There are no other options for service other than dial-up. In fact, several friends here in Seattle still use copper.net dial-up. You don't have to live in the hinterlands to have no options for fast service.
While there are a few good tech start-ups, this just isn't a tech city. The lack of outcry over lack of access, heck or even just cable TV availability, proves this isn't a tech city.
There were problems with TV and Net service. A tech arrives after 2-3 days and as soon as we talk to him it's obvious that the guy is not well trained or smart. He had a cutting and crimping tool and was going to replace the ends on the runs to my house. I said no. He makes a call and the second guy arrives with the same lack of ability. While talking to them I ask my son to call again to tell Cox WTF we're dealing with. My son is one of those tech wizard big brain guys and found some program to analyze our connection. The phone answer people have no idea what he is telling them. So, a third Cox tech arrives and he knows we were being treated poorly, sees how much packet loss there was, etc., gave us a new modem and said there will be no charge. Service has been good since then but my bill is close to USD $190 per month.
I helped design & build this network as a subcontractor for Comcast, you're welcome NOVA.
fiber to the house is wonderful, but i can't wait to get fiber in the house!
cjacobs001
We here in the interior of Alaska have up to 20mbps at 150 a month!
Omg that is sooooo cute? 14M bits. Bits. Hahagags c agsgsc a haha hahaha do you even have running water?
But if many people were to make a conscious effort to continuously live where the fastest Internet is, wouldn't that encourage places to develop fast internet to encourage an increase in the local economy?
When all the lawmakers who write the laws that regulate an industry, all the government bureacrats who regulate that industry, and the particular courts (and particularly the judges) who usually handle cases involving regulatory actions related to that industry are gathered in one place, it's a no-brainer to make sure the industry provides its best service in that same place.
What better way to fool lawmakers into thinking all of the country is adequately served than to serve THEM very well where they all hang-out together.
It's also where the "political elite" largely live, especially in the portions of Virginia near D.C (washington) not far from the nation's capitol.
Into contracts and bundles they do not want or need. They will tell you no contract then you call to change something and find out you have a contracted bundle even whan you made it clear that was not what you wanted. So sticking you with costly bandwidth you dont use just to get your email.
I am looking at COX.
Be very careful when you buy but even that most likely wont save you.
interesting article. Thanks for sharing. Alaska has the slowest connection? I guess Alaska still has limited infrastructure. Hopefully the big cities like Anchorage and Fairbanks have decent speeds.
Then the question becomes: How are speeds in other rural and sparsely populated states? The Dakotas, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, West Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona? Cell phone coverage is spotty in those states, at least for T-Mobile. I know, who uses T-Mobile in those states. lol