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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.
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.
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
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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)
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.
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.