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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.
We're paying about 10 times as much for 10 times slower speeds with 100 times smaller monthly data caps.
What shitty carrier are you on? I get an average of 19 Mbps on Rogers.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The UK is pretty small. I didn't see stats for Australia but I know I can get over 40Mbps in Sydney or Brisbane but drive from Sydney to Brisbane and and most of the way you are lucky to get 2G dialup speed for the 1000km journey.
Does UK enjoy the same amount of Freedom that America has?
Not even close!
***AMERICA!***
Significantly more when you look at the details.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Can we have a poll on whether to remove the EU tag from stories about the UK?
That's by city, not country. I would expect it to be cheaper to service cities, but semi-rural and rural areas have to be included also in the total, and often cities end subsiding rural areas in the US, for various political reasons. In short, rural areas "drag the rest down" in terms of implementation costs.
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, it probably depends upon where you actually live. The USoA is a very large country size wise. If you put Seattle lined up with London, Florida would cover Israel. So, saying Europe is better would include everywhere in between.
https://stevenglassman.files.w...
Yeah, comparing Europe to America is complete apples to apples for all cases. /sarcasm
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
We're not even talking Idaho.
How many LTE towers does it take to cover a McMansion suburb?
Only one, if you use Texas-sized radio waves. (Bandwidth may suffer in your area.)
Such a awesome vapid comment. Posted by AC, because coward.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
..is fast wireless, when you packets cant brexit the island?
Silence is a state of mime.
Hey now, my 50Mbps Verizon (err Frontier) connection is blindingly fast I'll tell you.... All the Speed Tests in the world prove it... But somehow, nothing seems to load faster.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The area of the UK is about 95K sq miles, about the same as the state of Wyoming. The 48 contiguous states are 30X larger than the UK in area.
So yeah it is a lot easier to deploy infrastructure when the amount you have to deploy is 30X less.
Freedom to get ripped off by Comcast and the other ISP oligopoly bandits?
Table-ized A.I.
I would like to set up a wall around the UK isps. Instead of sending all our web traffic out of the country or to places like the EU, let's keep our traffic British.
If you want a full picture of the situation, density should be considered. That may not matter from a typical consumer's perspective, but could from a political and national budget perspective.
Table-ized A.I.
US population is geographically* spread out. It's generally more expensive to provide service to a spread-out population, and that should be factored into any rating system.
Please, not this again.
This bold lie doesn't become more true by being repeated. Look at countries like Norway and Finland, where even if you discount the big cities, the remaining population is much more spread out than the US, and still has far better service.
The reason is legislation. To be a player on the market in many European countries, you have to provide service also where it's not profitable. Not only population coverage, but geographical coverage.
Wires are faster and you aren't broadcasting your traffic to everyone in the coffeeshop.
Despite everyone having faster home and mobile internet than typical US households, the US seems to make the most money off the internet.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This comparison is somewhat misleading because the entire UK is only about the size of 2-3 US states:
http://www.travelersdigest.com...
That's only because Brits don't enjoy anything. They have as much freedom as Americans, they just don't enjoy having it.
The French have more freedom than Americans, but they only enjoy complaining about everything.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Considering the insane profits US ISPs pull in every year I would say that is a non-issue. They've been paid so they should do the work.
Who cares how fast we can connect to Akamai? Worthless.
UK mobile Internet may be faster, but ours is more expensive.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
UK has good mobile internet speeds because the GCHQ insists upon it. The better to spy on you, my pretties!
This.
Every time one of these stories pops up the same tired excuses are trotted out.
There are plenty of countries with low pop density, but they still manage coverage just fine.
The problem is that with the US monopolies, and non-interoperating cellphone standards coverage suffers.
It simply boggles the mind.
Finland is tiny, As is the populated areas of Norway. While they may be spread out once out of the city it is still not a difficult task (though definitely unprofitable) to cover the remaining areas.
How is this moded insightful? Couple of years ago I spend two weeks in Cheshire which is a rural area, and got a SIM card that provided unlimited internet at up to 25Mbps for 15 quid for 30 days (prepaid in cash no questions asked, except is my phone unlocked which it is). There were some calls as well that I haven't used and didn't really bother with them. My iPhone 4GS at the time was consistently pulling around 13Mbps without LTE (which is about as fast as that phone can go as far as I can remember), and I tethered it to my laptop and watched 1080 Netflix in my hotel (about 5 to 8 Mbps needed). Most of Cheshire is middle of nowhere, enough so that I could easily recognize the pen test guys on the table next to mine. I got the same service in London for the following two weeks.
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.
Finland is tiny, As is the populated areas of Norway. While they may be spread out once out of the city it is still not a difficult task (though definitely unprofitable) to cover the remaining areas.
Take a look at a map.
Norway is 148,718 square mile.
Finland is 130,666 square mile.
Pennsylvania, which has awful coverage outside the big cities, is 46,055 square mile.
Norway is about as big as from Maine to the tip of Florida, with around 98% unarable land. Yet coverage and speeds, as I said even excluding the big cities is far, far better than in the US.
Rural Europe, far from cities has far better coverage than rural USA. That's indisputable.
(To say nothing about the cities)
so far, and mostly thanks to EU who has stopped UK from going batshit crazy on human rights.
but now Brexit has fixed that. so, I guess UK and USA will have the same level soon. and I don't mean that as a good thing.
Right.
The EU human rights laws prevented a lot of human rights violations by UK conservative governments.
It seems likely that Brexit might be prevented my parliamentary votes or a second referendum called because many voters were misled by lies during the first referendum. I certainly hope that is the case, since I'm British and European.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
*Europe* is a very densely-populated area while *America* has great swaths of sparsely-populated regions, some as big as entire European nations. What if we compare, say, New England to (Old) England? Is the disparity still as great? I think not...
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.
You are clearly one who does not understand the word 'bandwidth'.
Or let me explain it a bit: if you have a town of 1000 people, and you want to give them all 1mbps guaranteed bandwidth, you only need a mere 1Gbps "backbone". And still statistically every one of them likely had 5-10mbps bandwidth available when he "wants it".
For a city like NYC you neeeeeed zillllllions of Peta bps to connect all the people.
Connecting a remote area wireless to the internet: is dirt cheap But there are not many paying customers.
You got your logic completely reversed. I could connect a small village wireless via my DSL line to the internet and guarantee probably half an mbps for everyone. And obviously at night random people get 100mbps or more ... if only their phone could do that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
You overlook that the coverage outside the metro areas is far, far better in Scandinavia than the US. Exclude the largest cities, and compare the remaining. Rural Scandinavia is far less densely populated than rural USA, and yet has far better coverage.
The population density of the Northern Norway is approximately 1.66 people per mi^2. And an area that's 51,902 mi^2.
That's a population density far lower than all the 48 contiguous states.
If you subtract the Little Rock metro area, Arkansas has about the same area (49,089 mi^2) and a population density of around 45 people per mi^2. Yet Northern Norway has by far better internet and phone coverage and speeds.
Judging by population density, it should have been the other way around.
There's no way around it - if you factor in population density, the figures become worse for USA compared to Scandinavia, not better, as is so often claimed.
The excuse of the US size is completely bogus. The percentage of the urban population in the US is 80.7%, while the urban population of Germany is 74% (yet Germany has three times the speed of the US). And don't get me started on price people have to pay for the bad service they get.
Ah, democracy. This thing we all cherish, except when a vote doesn't go our way.
Actually, the US population is not more spread out. Germany, France and a lot of other European countries have a greater percentage of rural population than the US.
Not exactly. What should be considered is only the density of covered areas. And when we look at coverage in the US...
I really loath seeing the Us so behind in so many things. Why the heck do we not wake up and see that the US has better technology widely distributed throughout our population than any other nation? And to make it worse we have people chanting that the US is number one, endlessly and stupidly. If people would get into reality and realize that we are having a huge problem then we could work towards a better solution.
This is such a crap excuse. Take NYC for example, one of the highest population density cities in the world and yet you can't even get FIOS in most of the city. ISP's simply don't want to offer faster service. Verizon won't because they want to push you on to the wireless network, and time warner/charter doesn't want to lose cable tv subscribers to streaming services.
My office is in the Essex/Suffolk "bad-lands". I can't even get a phone signal let alone mobile internet.
I have 3.5 Mbit/s coming in over ADSL and about 500 Kbit/s out. That's as good as it gets for miles.
In the nearest town my connection craps out at about 13 Mbit/s (hypothetical - not theoretical!). But that's good enough for me.
matthew @ kuiash
Does your snark apply even in cases of election fraud, Mr Snarky?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ugh. I tried for FP, but the Internet is so slow in Canada, this is the soonest the post uploaded.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
But the German public transportation system is so much better than in any US state.
... from what I saw there, it's quite common to have a 3/4G connection as a main home connection. I live in France, and here, we all have optic fiber ,vdsl or adsl at worst, but I never visited any home where the main internet access is a 3/4G connection. That may explain a lot about the quality of the service.
-- moo
We need better metrics. 'Average connection speed' just doesn't cut it. A metric that contains subscribers per square mile in it's denominator.
Does UK enjoy the same amount of Freedom that America has?
Not even close!
***AMERICA!***
Significantly more when you look at the details.
How so? If the local government wants to censor you in a European country, they just have to label what you said as hate speech, regardless of whether or not it actually is. For example, it's illegal to collect WWII memorabilia in Germany, because it's considered "hateful" to do so, along with walking in any manner resembling a goose step.
All the goose-stepping, WWII collecting Americans must be loving this thread....
In the US meanwhile, so long as you aren't calling for somebody to be physically injured or killed, you can do or say whatever you want without fear of adverse government action against you.
You must be so proud
Let's also not get into the fact that pretty much everywhere you go in a populated area, your actions are likely being recorded on camera, and you have no right to defend yourself in the event of a home invasion.
I'm not aware of a single CCTV camera within a 1 mile radius of my home. Plenty of council ones in the town centre, but not in the wider suburbia.
Oh, and how's that mass surveillance working out for you?
In the UK, at least, you can use "reasonable force" to defend yourself. But it's true, I can't use disproportionate force, like shooting someone dead for wanting to steal my TV. We grew out of that in the early 19th century.
Three did actually. All you have to do is ask the sales guy for a better deal, they always have one better than the advertised price.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's better than what is in the UK, Czech Republic and Poland too.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"Most of Cheshire is middle of nowhere"? It's less than 20 miles from Manchester and Liverpool, both with a population of 500,000ish. If that's "middle of nowhere" by English standards, it only reinforces OP's point about population density.
The reason why you can't get FIOS is because franchise agreements prevent competition. There is a new trend where the Municipality owns the infrastructure, and the competition is no longer for the last mile, but for services to be delivered.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Population of Germany 80.62 million
Population of US 318.9 million
US has almost 4 times the population of Germany.
Size of Germany 357,168 km
Size of USA 9.857 million km
US has 27 times more land mass than Germany. US is 8 times less dense than Germany. Pretending that these things do not matter is a fools argument.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It depends on how big that suburb is. A single tower can service a 50 km radius in flat land.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
https://www.att.com/maps/wirel...
https://www.t-mobile.com/cover...
https://vzwmap.verizonwireless...
https://coverage.sprint.com/IM...
What are you talking about? The only service with spotty coverage in PA is Sprint. Everyone else has coverage over most of the state, excepting the mountains in the north central portion of the state.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It is so sad that Russia, a European country has so much trouble covering Siberia with 4g LTE signals. They are so terrible at cellphones, they should be ashamed.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You get 50 Mbps on your cell phone? If not, then you are talking oranges in a story of apples. This is about 4G LTE speeds. Though I have to say, I have never wondered why my cell phone is so slow, it is usually way faster than I need anyways.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
and if you want to go from i.e. Portugal to Italy, you either have to pay roaming costs or buy another sim card and plan for another carrier.
Not any more. Inter EU roaming costs have been outlawed by the EU.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
No, you didn't. No carrier offers what you are describing at that price (and they didn't two years ago either when prices were even higher than now.)
Yeah actually he did. I did on Three. And prices have gone up over the last couple of years, not down. Now paying £20 a month SIM only for 600 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited data with 30GB of tethering.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Yes, and people have on average 1.97 legs.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Is this a geographic average (were they testing areas in the middle of nowhere) or a population average? That'll probably make quite a bit of difference.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Comparing landlines to mobile coverage is not valid. They're different things with different limitations.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
But even "rural" areas of Germany are closer to real cities and more densely populated, in general, than rural America.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
That really depends on how you rank different aspects of freedom, and whether you consider so-called "positive freedoms" (healthcare, welfare, etc.) to actually be freedoms. It also depends on whether you are on the side of freedom of speech or on freedom from hate speech - depending on which ideological side you fall on, those will give quite different results.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
All the goose-stepping, WWII collecting Americans must be loving this thread....
If you only believe in freedom for people you agree with, you don't believe in freedom.
In the UK, at least, you can use "reasonable force" to defend yourself. But it's true, I can't use disproportionate force, like shooting someone dead for wanting to steal my TV.
In the US, you can't shoot someone dead for *wanting* to steal your TV; in some states, you can shoot them if they *try* to steal your TV. Do you think you shouldn't be allowed to defend your possessions at all, or what would "proportionate" force look like to you? In the UK, in many cases you aren't allowed to carry anything that would actually help you defend yourself. I'm not even talking about guns; effective pepper spray and knives are banned in many areas.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
>That really depends on how you rank different aspects of freedom
Indeed it does.
> (healthcare, welfare, etc.)
I've tried both. Healthcare and welfare wins hands down, both as an individual and as an employer.
> whether you are on the side of freedom of speech or on freedom from hate speech
The EU rules do a pretty good job on this. The US has some good rules, but they get violated all the time and the highly litigious natures of the US does more to suppress free speech in the US than actual criminal laws do in either place.
The US is pretty bad on stupid laws. Jaywalking, excessive copyright laws, alcohol laws etc.
The industry that appreciates what I do is in the US, so that's where I am and the US or the UK are certainly not the worst places to live, but we shouldn't let that cloud our judgement of how free they are.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The EU rules do a pretty good job on this. The US has some good rules, but they get violated all the time and the highly litigious natures of the US does more to suppress free speech in the US than actual criminal laws do in either place.
I'm going to have to partially disagree with you on this; I don't think hate speech laws are a good thing, as they're far too easily abused by those in power. I will agree that litigation does have a chilling effect on free speech, although I'm not sure it's worse than the criminal laws.
The US certainly does have its fair share of stupid laws, but enforcement of those can sometimes be lax - which, admittedly, doesn't make up for the laws existing in the first place. I'm not sure what the jaywalking laws are in the UK, but enforcement varies drastically across the US. On the East Coast in particular, they really aren't applied; I've jaywalked with cops sitting right there before and nobody cared. I've heard the West Coast tends to enforce those quite a bit more; on the other hand, you can lose your driver's license in Germany for doing that, so at least it's not uniquely American. Alcohol laws are somewhat influenced by state; the drinking age is certainly too high though.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
You are clearly one who does not understand the word 'bandwidth'.
You clearly don't understand how cellular networks are built. If you have a town of 1,000 people spread out over 1,000 miles^2 you have to cover it with radios and provide backhaul to each one. Good luck running DSL with a population density of 1 person per mile. Do you know what a DSLAM is? Do you understand the distance limitations of DSL? Do you understand the range of a radio antenna?
Connecting a remote area wireless to the internet: is dirt cheap But there are not many paying customers.
Connecting a single area with a single radio is, assuming you already have connectivity to an upstream provider. Running backhaul all over the country is not cheap. At all. Do you not understand that extremely rural places don't have DSL or have extremely low speed DSL?
On the opposite end, in very dense areas, you run into a completely different problem. And that's limited spectrum availability due to obstructions and user density.
You overlook that the coverage outside the metro areas is far, far better in Scandinavia than the US
That's because, quite honestly, no one in the US cares about coverage in rural areas. We don't have any interest in investing money into cellular service to cover mountain ranges and cow pastures.
The population density of the Northern Norway is approximately 1.66 people per mi^2. And an area that's 51,902 mi^2. That's a population density far lower than all the 48 contiguous states.
You'd have to compare that to a rural part of a single state in the US. You're taking a part of Norway versus entire state averages, many of which are as large as Norway. ALL of Montana is 7/mi^2. That includes cities like Billings with a population density of over 2,000/mi^2.
But the biggest problem is assuming that you can scale up a system for a tiny little country like Norway to something the size of the USA. It doesn't work like that, in anything. It's much more difficult to manage at real scale. Meanwhile no single country on earth has ever done it, so I don't know what you base that assumption on.
Even if that were the case (which it's not; not yet anyways,) the EU is tiny compared to North America. Hell, the US alone dwarfs the EU.
Do you not understand that extremely rural places don't have DSL or have extremely low speed DSL?
In your fucked up country perhaps.
However, it can't be so hard to build one.
Point is: neither do I need a interconnected cellular network to connect it to "the internet" nor is it expensive in any means of the word to connect remote areas via DSL or better technologies to backbones.
In your country it is simply not done as you have brain dead legislations.
In my country every major telecom operator is mandated by law to connect even the remotest areas. And surprisingly that works in countries like Finland or Norway: without a damn need for a law.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
However, it can't be so hard to build one.
So you don't understand anything about building cellular networks, no country has ever built up a cellular network at the scale of the United States to those specifications but somehow you think you can scale up a network at 25x the size of a tiny country and deliver the same service and cost?
Look no offense, but you don't know what you're talking about.
Point is: neither do I need a interconnected cellular network to connect it to "the internet"
I don't know what you're trying to say here. You don't think that the cellular network has to be connected to the Internet? Why is "the internet" in quotes?
In your country it is simply not done as you have brain dead legislations. In my country every major telecom operator is mandated by law to connect even the remotest areas. And surprisingly that works in countries like Finland or Norway: without a damn need for a law.
You're comparing a country with 320 million people to a country with 5 million homogeneous people and you can't figure out why we don't all agree on something?
Do you really believe that you could manage a country that is 64x the size of Norway and provide exactly the same services and have the same unified political will?
You really need to compare all of the EU to the US to really understand the political situation. We have people who live thousands of miles from one another who are all governed by the same federal legislation. It's nearly impossible to get everyone to agree on anything. You couldn't even keep the UK from leaving the EU for goodness sake.