Slashdot Mirror
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.
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