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US Ranks 28th In the World In Average Wireless Broadband Speeds (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from DSLReports: The United States is 28th in terms of wireless broadband data speeds, according to the latest Akamai state of the internet report (pdf, hat tip ReCode). According to the data collected by the company, the United States average mobile broadband speed is now a not-entirely unrespectable 10.7 Mbps. But that speed pales in comparison to the top average speeds being seen in the UK (26 Mbps), Cyprus (24.2 Mbps), Germany (24.1 Mbps), and Finland (21.6 Mbps). The report is quick to note that US carrier efforts to boost speeds via next-generation broadband aren't quite as cutting edge as carrier marketing departments might have you believe. Many U.S. carriers have promised that their own fifth generation (5G) broadband deployments should deliver theoretical speeds up to 1 Gbps as well, but serious deployment isn't expected until 2020 or so. Some of this lagging can be explained away by the United States' mammoth geography, though some of it can also be explained by what, until recently, has been fairly muted but theatrical competition between major carriers.
That means Canada is probably 280th.
#DeleteFacebook
Is there a sorting for the usage caps per country? I know Germany may have super-fast speeds, but most data plans cap you at 2 GB per month (mine at 500 MB per month) and then drop you to 64 kbps. Or to NONE AT ALL unless you buy more at extorrtionate prices.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The FCC of late seems to work for the broadband providers.
The fiasco with net neutrality is plenty of evidence
Considering the US has more than 10 times the land area than the UK, Cyprus, Germany, and Finland combined, I'd say we're not doing too bad!
Even when I connect at 4G, I would kill for dial-up when the power goes out in the neighborhood. Everyone connects through their cell phone and getting the latest weather map takes about 10 minutes if it gets at all. The wireless carriers may advertise high speeds, but that is only if a few people connect to your serving tower. Typical speeds may vary depending on the size of the party on the line.
The subject line is an honest question. It's certainly nice to have faster speeds available, but in terms of everyday usage, I can't think of anything a typical mobile user would do today that would benefit significantly from speeds above about 10Mbps. 1080p streaming from YouTube or Netflix only needs about 2-4Mbps, and HD video streaming is about the heaviest operation I'd expect a typical user to engage in. Maybe download an MP3 or read some e-mails? Do a little web browsing? None of those benefit significantly, and, frankly, many servers throttle downloads anyway, preventing users from benefiting from faster speeds.
Obviously, many of us here can think of reasons we ourselves have for wanting more, such as using your phone as a WiFi hotspot so that you can torrent the latest episode of Game of Thrones on your laptop while sipping a Mai Tai on the beach, but I'm not talking about those sorts of uncommon uses. I'm also NOT saying that "10Mbps is enough for anyone, and no one will ever need more". Clearly our consumption will keep increasing for the foreseeable future, so we obviously need to keep improving our infrastructure.
Even so, I'm honestly curious if there are any common, compelling use cases around today that I'm forgetting about that benefit from faster speeds. If not, then it would suggest that deployment is basically where it should be (at least in terms of mobile) and that there isn't a problem yet.
I live in Georgia. All of my politicians are bought and paid for by ATT, Verizon, Comcast and ....one other ... Frontier??.
They are scum who don't care about us. They throw us a bone every once in a while, but make REAL changes to better their constituency? AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Fuckers. I try to vote out the assholes but you see, I live where having a 'D' by your name is suicide (hopefully Ossoff will change that.) We have had trouble getting change.
The dumb hicks I live near listen to Political Talk Radio and have Fox News on all the time and think 'gubberment regulations are bad. They hurt jobs. They stop growth.' because they are told by the talking heads who make tens of millions of dollars by being lying Trolls - like Hannity, O'Reilly, Rush, that transsexual- Anne Coulter, and others.
Like it was in the 30s when there was no internet, women were expected to be quiet and let men make all the decisions, discrimination against minorities was openly practiced and often enshrined in law and Nazis were gaining political power.
USA USA USA
Requiem for the American Dream
... when compared to countries with population of exactly 321.4 million people
The ever popular corporate go-to excuse for poor wireless service in the U.S.
This is a very thin layer of truthiness - an excuse that sounds sort of plausible - if you don't actually look at any data or think about the subject at all.
What is it about the large thinly populated sections of the U.S. that would pull down wireless speeds on average? Wireless service is a local service, and the U.S. is highly urbanized. It is no more challenging to provide high speed service to a U.S. city than any other city in the world. Sure, maybe service for the 1/3 of Wyoming's population that live outside of cities is slow -- but this is very few people and should have a very slight effect on the national average. Even in those low density states, most people live in cities (the only states for which that is not true is Maine, Vermont and West Virginia).
Consider that Australia, which is nearly as large as the U.S. has faster wireless service, despite having only one tenth the population. It population density is one of the lowest in the world.
Consider that Finland, which has less than half the U.S. population density of the U.S. has the third fastest wireless in the world. Similarly with Norway which is number five.
The important statistic is not total land area (the empty space in the Yukon, Wyoming or Montana is not slowing down traffic in Greater New York), or even population density, but urbanization. The urbanization of the U.S. is 82.4%, about the same as Finland. All urban areas have high population density, and building out a fast service for that population is as easy in the U.S. as anywhere else. All that empty space in Finland is not slowing down their service.
The "but the U.S. is so big!" excuse makes no sense.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
. . .everybody in the US better get used to having broadband speeds that are merely adequate.
Go USA!
Even more shameful is, the United States have slipped to 182nd in the world in Alphabetical Order :(
What do the distributions across entire national populations look like? Averages only convey a partial view of the true distribution. Does the distribution include all households or just those with internet access? I would like to see a metric like percentage of all households with access speeds above a given threshold, like 25Mbps. That distinction between high and low speeds is perhaps more practical than how much higher than 25Mps access speeds can reach. Alternatively, average ping times or percentage of households with ping times below some threshold would be interesting.
by having the most IPv4 addresses of any country in the world!
You don't win the Internet by having the fastest download speed.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What mobile applications requires client download speeds of either 10.7 OR 26 Mb/sec? I mean we're talking about wireless broadband, right?
Ken