As long as congress continues to willfully ignore cable monopolies with the help of lobbyist friends, it’s a cesspool. Why does this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast even exist in its current form.
United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
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Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average. edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of…
Yup, but I wonder why there were bandwidth issues in Europe when the pandemic first started (video streaming services started throttling bitrate very aggressively in Europe) but there were no issues in the United States. Perhaps the last mile average is slow but the overall infrastructure and backbone is more robust in the US (this would make sense historically as well)
Wireless internet is more common in European and Asian countries because you can put up a few towers and be done, it gets throttled when you have congestion.
America has fiber and mostly copper (from our phone line laying days) strung all throughout America, the bandwidth is much higher in total.
The job left here is replacing copper w/ fiber (or at least DOCSIS 3.1 via copper), but it's expensive and some ISPs it isn't worth it for the customers they have, so you have some areas bringing the national average down.
Starlink will be nice for really remote areas where it make no sense to run a line or a tower for a couple customers. Existing sat internet is unusable. There's also been a big push to modernize slightly bigger towns with fiber by smaller ISPs.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#13I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of America? I imagine it’s much more difficult to build out a larger network especially when many parts of America are not very populated.
Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average. edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of…
While density may be part of it, my (admittedly: anecdotal) experience in splitting my time between Los Angeles and the nearby mountain communities over the last year is that LA broadband speed is consistently 5 times slower.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#14I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of America? I imagine it’s much more difficult to build out a larger network especially when many parts of America are not very populated.
I live in a semi-rural area, on a dirt road off the highway with 15-20 other neighbors on our half-mile stretch of street. Until Starlink hit, the best internet we could get was 500kbps unmetered, and maybe 4mbps metered if you were lucky. It was genuinely that bad.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#15I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of America? I imagine it’s much more difficult to build out a larger network especially when many parts of America are not very populated.
Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average. edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of…
This is the usual argument against doing large infrastructure in the USA, and I think it’s kind of missing the point: the USA also has much larger financial and physical resources than those countries. We also have counterarguments: we have a universal electrical network. We built a large railroad network across the entire country. We have an interstate highway system reaching every continental state (and with “interstates” in Alaska and Hawaii as well, if I’m not mistaken). Also, universal telephone service.
I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I can’t get cell reception at my house. I have basic broadband, but I can’t get fiber despite being on a street where other houses have it.
I would be very interested in a comparison of what the citizens of each country have paid to fund internet service. US taxpayers have given the telecom mono/duopolies a ton of free money and right-of-way and the providers have broken every promise to provide universal service in exchange.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#16What is wrong with being 12th?
The numbers all look pretty massive anyway and my 70Mb/s is fast enough for me to work from home and stream video.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#17As long as congress continues to willfully ignore cable monopolies with the help of lobbyist friends, it’s a cesspool. Why does this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast even exist in its current form.
I live in a city with an excellent home grown independent fiber ISP which really should be used as a case study for such things around the country.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#18It’s hard to tell if these results hold any meaning or not. Where did the numbers come from? Are these just averages from their users? If so, I’d imagine a huge selection bias pushing these numbers up. Are these households only or do they include data centers? I’m betting the US has a higher density of servers per capita than most countries. Using the median or including standard deviation seems like the only way to…
Yeah, it's just averages of whoever happens to go to speedtest.net and do a speed test in a given month, with a minimum of 300 users for a country to be listed.
For some of the countries, if you click through they give medians for sub-entities (states/provinces or cities). As you'd expect, they're significantly lower than the means on the front page. Not sure why they don't give country-level medians.
A few examples for major cities (median downloads in Mbps): Austin 182, NYC 169, Milan 153, San Francisco 144, Calgary 130, DC 122, Beijing 121, Paris 119, Miami 118, Shanghai 117, Toronto 99, Minneapolis 96, Rome 90, Montreal 65.
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#19Rural broadband vs. Urban broadband? The US has a much larger geographical area of rural communities than the countries ranked higher. Hong Kong for instance is 1/3 of the size of Rhode Island with 7x the population. Much easier to give good broadband speeds with high population density in a small area. Hell Monaco is one of those countries and it covers less than 500 acres...
Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index
#20I travel internationally for work. My experience has been that while pockets of Asia (the large cities) are great, once you get outside of those cities it collapses. In europe, Internet access seems to be almost universally "meh". Australia is pretty good (although I haven;t gone rural there, and Australia, while land-mass rich, is still pretty concentrated in a more limited number of rural areas).
The big knock I have is the cost per byte in the USA, especially once you consider caps. That's a huge huge issue. Like everything right now in the US, its haves versus have notes.