UK Has Fastest Mobile Internet While US Lags Behind, Says Report (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: Content delivery network Akamai says the UK has the best average mobile connection speeds in the world. The State of the Internet report claims that British mobile users were able to get average speeds of 27.9 Mbps when connecting to Akamai's HTTP/S platform in Q1 2016, beating most countries in Europe by an average of more than 10 Mbps, and the United States' average speed by more than 20 Mbps. For comparison, the U.S. had an average connection speed of 5.1 Mbps, which was lower than Turkey, Kenya, and Paraguay, and on par with Thailand. Many European countries more than doubled the average U.S. speed, including Slovakia with 13.3 Mbps, France with 11.5 Mbps, and Germany with 15.7 Mbps. Algeria was only 2.9 Mbps slower than the United States' average with 2.2 Mbps, and they had the lowest average speed of countries included in the report. Akamai says its data shows that regular internet connections have continued to increase in speed, jumping 12 percent from Q4 2015 to 6.3 Mbps in Q1 2016, which is a year-on-year boost of 23 percent. Peak connection speed also rose to 34.7 Mbps, a 6.8 percent increase from the last quarter, and a 14 percent increase year-on-year. In addition, mobile data traffic is rising from just over 3,500 petabytes per month in Q1 2015 to more than 5,500 petabytes per month in the same period this year.

Comments

Re:The USA is Huge

[OzPeter]

The UK is pretty small.

Yeah and the US is large. But New York city has a higher population density than Tokyo, yet only a fraction of the internet speeds. So while you can argue that there is a large area with no or low speed access, you can't excuse crap service in prime areas

Re:Population Density

[jon3k]

USA: 9,833,517 km^2
Norway: 385,178 km^2
Finland: 338,424 km^2

So the USA is >25x larger than Norway and Finland. You're also looking at aggregate population density. In the USA you have to average in the extremely rural areas with little to no coverage, like Montana and Wyoming which have 1/3 the population density of Norway. Or how about Alaska? Norway has 35x the population density. There will always be large areas in the US with little to no wireless coverage bringing down the average.

I'm not saying that the USA has better broadband coverage but no one with any concept of delivering wireless service would try and compare these deployments. You have to provide wireline backhaul to all of these towers. It's not realistic to run fiber to ever rural place in the US. Personally I don't want to force wireless providers to provide service to the middle of nowhere at the same speeds as dense, urban centers. It's a waste of resources.

I absolutely believe that we should be doing a better job but using Norway and Finland as a metric is absurd.