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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 .
Me too. I live in Seattle and we only have 300 baud modems. We share them with 25 other people too.
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 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.
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.