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Average Broadband Speed in US Rises Above 50 Mbps For First Time (techcrunch.com)
Internet speeds are getting faster in the United States, especially in cities such as Kansas City, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix, according to a new Speedtest Market Report. The report, by Ookla's popular service, found that fixed broadband customers saw the biggest jump in performance this year with download speeds achieving an average of over 50Mbps for the first time ever. The result marks a 40 percent increase since July 2015. From a TechCrunch report: That average, 54.97 megabits per second is 42 percent higher than the same period last year, and upload jumped even more -- 18.88 is 51 percent higher year over year. This is all based on the 8 million or so daily tests conducted on Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound. Comcast Xfinity took the honors for fastest speed on average, but its 125 megabits wasn't that much higher than the competition: Cox with 118 and Spectrum with 114. [...] On mobile, Verizon and T-Mobile are tied for first place with 21 megabits and change download speed on average, though the latter beats the competition by a long shot with upload speeds averaging 11.59 megabits. Poor Sprint, though.
Is probably the result of people using mobile phone data instead of DSL .
to report, when the measurement in question is not normally distributed about the mean. I'm skeptical that the median broadband speed is anywhere close to 50 mbps, especially discounting university internet. I live in the suburb of a large enough city, and I can get 15/2 for $, or I can get the next tier up for 4$.
"This is all based on [...] Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound."
I tried reading this aloud and couldn't keep a straight face.
I and my neighbors are nowhere near 50mb, I have the fastest and it is just 3mb's
They have service upward of 250/250, but not willing to pay that much a month.
I'm not surprised. Time Warner, the largest provider in the states has been rolling out decent upgrades recently. I'm in Kentucky (not typically the best availability) and am at 300/20 mbps as of this year. Not sure if this is a trend with other ISPs
I can directly attribute this bump in speed in my town (Austin) to Google Fiber. Before Google announced they were coming to Austin, the absolute fastest consumer-grade connection one could get was 50 Mbits, through TWC. As soon as Google mentioned their intentions to enter Austin with their Fiber service, TWC immediately started offering 100, 200, and even 300 Mbit plans, with plans for a 500 Mbit service level on the horizon. AT&T did something similar with their U-Verse service as well. Hell, I can even get these speeds in the next town over (Buda), where Google hasn't even announced they're going to go into. A little competition goes a long way.
They're increasing the average by NOT deploying it to shitty places that can only do DSL. Also, as the country becomes more urban, the average speed will increase, even if ISPs do nothing.
It's just math.
I'm in a small town and the best I can get is 5mpbs with a 180 Gb/month allocation for $95 CAD.
Poor sprint? What about all us suckers stuck with Time Warner? Notoriously worse customer service than the DMV and speeds that are so bad they don't even make the list.
This is all based on the 8 million or so daily tests conducted on Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound.
So how many people on the same old DSL line run a speed test to check that there speed is the same as it was 10 years ago? People use speed tests when they got a new line, they've upgraded it or they're troubleshooting. They don't do it at random. Our national statistics here in Norway is based on collection of subscription statistics, which seems far more reliable as users would probably complain if they didn't get what they paid for. Last figures are 1,914,431 broadband connections, average of 40.2 Mbps with a median of 25.6 Mbps.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Windstream provides a whopping(sic) 6-Mbps for nearing $80/mo. Cable internet crosses my driveway and every request for connection has been turned down because I'm too far off the road; even after my offer to take care of the last 700 feet...
They say this is "broadband" speeds, but broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads.
So, someone could be sneaky and say 'oh, those 10 Mbps connections aren't broadband anymore', and you just drop out the lowest numbers, and miraculously the average goes up.
Schools were using this trick by keeping the poorly performing students from taking standardized testing to raise their test averages.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It's much better than what it was a decade ago, but there are STILL legions of people out in rural areas who are still on dialup. "Connected at 28.8Kbps" is still something to celebrate. Nevermind that 56K modem- multiplexed phone lines abound out beyond metro areas.
My family has to stack wood so we can emit a burst of one's and zero's with our signal fire. The baud rate is terrible, and we keep getting parity errors when the blankets burn through. The cost of enough cords of wood to keep the connection up is horrific.
To be fair, they did try to put a telegraph line in, but the Smith's down the road a ways cut and burned the poles trying to watch porn, and so that never came about.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm paying about $140/mo for 30/5 with a static IP via DSL.
They're hanging fiber from the poles now (apparently burying it is too expensive), but I don't know if they'll actually offer us anything faster; there's only one pipe out of here. My middle son is on optical already, and he's running at a whopping 10/1. I think they're just tired of maintaining all that old copper. Lots of lightning here, keeps the repair people running hard all summer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So do you think one day there will be a headline:
Well I'm doing my best to keep it down with my 13mb CenturyLink DSL line... and patiently (grrr...) waiting for Google Fiber.
> broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads.
Which is itself an example of government redefining scientific truth, not unlike the Indiana Pi bill. Baseband, passband, narrowband, and broadband have actual meanings, they describe the physics of how the connection works. 100 Mbps ethernet uses one channel, therefore it is narrowband. Gigabit ethernet uses four channels, so it's broadband.
The Akamai State of the Internet Q1 2016 has a US average Internet bandwidth of 15 Mbps, which is far more believable.
I agree that there are plenty of people in the US with 50 Mbps+ (I have that myself), but there are still a lot of people on the end of long DSL loops who will never get higher than 5 Mbps.
IT IS FREE! 51 MB/s FREE because Microsoft is TRUST
I've been on an ancient Sprint unlimited data plan (true unlimited data - I've used up to 112 GB in a month with no complaints and no throttling) for $50/mo for over a decade now. They had a rough spot with the WiMax bungle, but I stuck with them gambling that they'd pull through. And they have. I almost always have LTE service now in Southern California. TFA lists Sprint's (and AT&T's) LTE coverage as 93% vs Verizon's 98% (then uses a graph whose scale is apparently 90%-100% to exaggerate the difference). It's the LTE coverage which is key. It was really painful when Sprint was down near 50%, but it's actually pretty rare for me to see my phone in 3G mode nowadays.
As for LTE speed, the average of the other carriers is 21.2 Mbps down, 9.3 Mbps up. Sprint's is 15.8 Mbps down, 4.9 Mbps up, or 75% down and 53% up vs the other carriers. Unless you're streaming 4k video to your cell phone, or regularly shoot a lot of videos and insist that they be uploaded to cloud backup immediately, these differences simply don't matter. They're all "fast enough" - they correspond to a few seconds or even a split second difference in most use cases.
The speeds are to the point where consistency (better coverage, fewer dead spots) is a more important factor. And by that metric there's now only a 5% difference between the best and worst mobile carrier in the U.S. Hardly worth the 2x price Verizon wants for service. That's why I gambled and decided not to give up my unlimited plan on Sprint by switching carriers. Once your coverage reaches about 90% (which was where Verizon was at when Sprint was around 50%), you're pretty close to maxed out. There's simply not much more improvement you can make. Whereas Sprint at 50% had a lot of room for possible improvement. (Your experience will vary with location. I hear Sprint still sucks in the Bay Area.)
(And if you're curious, no I'm not a bandwidth hog. My monthly data use is usually down around 1-3 GB. Just every now and then I go on a business trip or vacation, and use my phone as a hotspot so I and my family/friends can get Internet on our laptops and tablets. I'd have to pay $15/GB for overage if I switched to Verizon. The month I used 112 GB would've cost me over $1500. No thanks.)
Ookla/speedtest.net is used by people on fast connections to see how fast they can push data, not by people on slow connections to see how bad they are, and not by the general public to accumulate representative data. This report would be like going to a drag strip and then claiming that the data shows that the average American car does a 1/4 mile in 8 seconds.
Fast ethernet uses one channel. It is therefore baseband. That's a fact. It's not a matter of opinion. Claiming that ethernet isn't baseband, but rather broadband, is just like claiming that ethernet is wifi. That's simply false.
Baseband vs broadband are determined by whether a signal is multi-channel or single-channel, and have nothing to do with speed. "Defining" ethernet as broadband is precisely the same as "defining" Pi as 4.
More about baseband vs broadband transmission:
http://www.pearsonitcertificat...
It would be correct for the FCC to come up with their own standard for "high speed". Saying that broadband is "anything over X Mbps" is exactly the same as saying "anything over X Mbps is fiber optic". It's factually false.
Seriously, it would be nice if Google offered up partnership in their cable company to Amazon and Netflix. OR let them start their own, with google setting them up on how to compete. After all, the faster that we get competition out there amongst all states, the faster that Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc can see their speeds go without paying anything to current bandwidth providers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> No one is "Defining ethernet as broadband".
Here's the FCC announcement where they said any connection greater than 25 Mbps one way and 3 Mbps the other is a broadband connection:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Obviously at 100 Mbps, that includes ethernet. So yes, the FCC has declared that Ethernet is broadband.
Yet it continues to be baseband, whether the FCC likes it or not.
Sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts. The FCC is defining the marketing term "broadband" which has meant "it's like fast and stuff" for over a decade now. But since they could call 10Mb broadband, and 10Mb isn't fast in the era of HD streaming, they're upping the requirement to use that marketing term.
Wait until Google Fiber and Verizon FIOS are widely available.
We'll make great pets
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.speedtest.net/my-re... 1.5Mbps/down .37Mbps/up for $30/mo
With Frontier spending their profits on fighting municipal/community broadband competition I've really got to find an alternative out here...
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Actually it doesn't have anything to do with using "broadband" as a marketing term. It's from a 1996 law directing the FCC to create regulations "encouraging" ISP to deploy high-speed BROADBAND service to "underserved" areas. Congress meant "make them build infrastructure for HIGH SPEED service in rural areas". Apparently not knowing what "broadband" meant, Congresd required that ISPs build "broadband", which means the medium is shared by frequency (channel) rather than by time, such as TDMA or CMDA.
Anyway, it's about regulations requiring that ISPs build "broadband" networks, nothing to do with using the term "broadband" in marketing.
Funny thing many high speed fiber connections don't qualify under the wording of the law - they are baseband, and the law says it has to be broadband.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Ummm... Nowhere in your link will you find anyone "defining ethernet as broadband".
Obviously at 100 Mbps, that includes ethernet.
LOL, Wut? You may want to do a bit of reading. What you've written is completely incoherent.
I'm still waiting on this: What "scientific truth" are they "redefining", exactly? Or have you finally figured out that that particular claim was absurd nonsense?
Required reading for internet skeptics
> Talk about redefining terms. Cite a reference that says broadband is defined that way.
Here's one easy to read explanation of baseband vs broadband:
http://www.pearsonitcertificat...
See also most any physical networking standards document.
> What if my gig ethernet is optical? Am I now narrowband? How about optical 10Gb?
Early and simple optical networking standards were baseband (using a single channel or frequency). Faster and more current standards are often broadband (multiple frequencies). There are many optical Ethernet standards. Most are baseband. 10GBASEâ'LX4 is broadband, requiring a frequency division multiplexer.
I can't imagine any home user being routinely constrained by their ISP's highest broadband download limit. Even if you have only 10 MBPS, that's enough to have 2 Netflix movies playing simultaneously and still surf, talk on a VOIP phone, send/receive email, and play music from Spotify. All at the same time. There just aren't many servers from which you are likely to downloading data that will give you more than 10 MBPS.
ISP's are marketing speed as if it's the valuable commodity. But we don't really have a killer data consuming app that challenges even moderate ISP speeds. Unless you have a large family of internet junkies, you don't need the speed.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I still have the same 1.5Mbps down, 300Kbps up connection that I have since 2006 when I built my house and that was a good DSL speed, so 50Mbps now would be a dream connection. My kids cannot even watch Youtube and/or Netflix while I work (from home) or else everything comes to a standstill not to mention that most training that I have to complete this year for work is online and in video form so it brings endless buffering and wait time. I always thought it was a joke that your internet connection speed was a limiting factor in education but I suppose the joke is on me because all I get is frustration and anger when I try to watch them and then half the time just give up and plan to come back to it later. Some competition would be nice.