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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.
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.
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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.
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