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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

#51

Post by SteveGerencser »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #44
SteveGerencser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We moved to a small rural community where a T1 isn't even available. I can get a 3Mb DSL connection or satellite. I have both because I need to redundancy. I did call to see what it would cost to have 'real' internet brought out here. They were happy to bring out a fiber line from the nearest town to serve our area. But it was going to cost me around $5k/mo with a 3 year contract for a 10Mb dedicated line. It's cheap…

It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far. I would encourage you to look into this more, if you haven't already. I set up such a connection for my in-laws who live in rural Oklahoma, and it's been a resounding success. It still has issues, but it's worlds better than the antiquated satellite options they had before. They'll likely transition to using Starlink when it's available as the point to point con…

I prepaid for Starlink 4 or 5 months ago and just waiting for my turn to get it.

We did talk about setting up a community point to point system but the 'old guys' that run the area are more interested in getting (forcing) more people on to 'city' water than anything actually useful because city water fees are the only thing keeping this town alive.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#52

Post by eschulz »

miah_ wrote: post #29

I live in rural Michigan. My nearest "big city" has a estimated population of 2800. No big ISP has run anything our direction. We are just now getting municipal gas run in our area, our house has been on propane since it was built in the 90's. My current internet connection is provided by wifi access points strung across neighbors roofs that terminates into a T-Mobile data connection somewhere. I get on average 8Mbps…

I also have a place in the rural Upper Midwest (not MI). Our community-owned electric utility has been very aggressively putting fiber out to all the farms and villages in the counties who participate in this cooperative. I thought it would take years to get to my farm, but I was surprised and incredibly happy when put fiber onto my property within weeks of me filling out a form declaring my interest. Now I just have to pay a modest installation fee to get it put into the house.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#53

Post by jcims »

artificial wrote: post #4

It’ll be curious to see how this progresses with Starlink.

I live in the country, work in a fairly data-centric job (infosec) and have worked from home a majority of the time for the past 15 years. Until this Feb my only connection to the internet was a 15M/768k DSL connection.

In Feb I got involved with a statewide project to bring Starlink in to see if it would support rural broadband initiatives. I've been running on it since. Average download and upload speeds are 10x and 30x respectively.

Up until the last month or so, however, the intermittent outages in Starlink had been a much bigger problem than the low bandwidth of the DSL connection, and so I worked over DSL and the rest of the house ran on Starlink. It's slowly getting to the point of being acceptible and I just recently switched work over to Starlink, but there are days where i switch back because the unplanned interruptions are extreeemely irritating.

All of that said, I'm super stoked about Starlink and think it's going to do a lot for rural/mobile living around the world.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#54

Post by rootusrootus »

pcurve wrote: post #38
Arubis wrote: post #22

That’s…not terrible? Getting broadband in rural America is rough, and the permissive atmosphere for monopolistic behavior by ISPs is maddening. Pricing for internet access is way worse than in East Asia or western and central Europe. Some folks can’t get real broadband at all, and they’re disproportionally lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. That’s not fair. These issues are real. But overall, 12th sounds…prett…

It's shockingly good. I'm actually very proud of this statistic. Most won't see material difference between 200mbps vs #1 spot of 250mbps. It's negligible. However. I think there's a rather huge sampling bias, because the data is gathered from people who come to Speedtest.com to run the test.

I'd wager most people's WiFi routinely stays well below 200Mbps anyway.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#55

Post by 0-_-0 »

Arubis wrote: post #22

That’s…not terrible? Getting broadband in rural America is rough, and the permissive atmosphere for monopolistic behavior by ISPs is maddening. Pricing for internet access is way worse than in East Asia or western and central Europe. Some folks can’t get real broadband at all, and they’re disproportionally lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. That’s not fair. These issues are real. But overall, 12th sounds…prett…

>Those top ten spots will always be filled by nations with highly concentrated, relatively wealthy populations.

Romania, Thailand and Chile is top 10...

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#56

Post by comeonseriously »

Bayart wrote: post #23
badsoftware wrote: post #2

I 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.

While it's a point that intuitively makes sense, I'm not too sure of its true relevance. The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse. At least it can't be the only reason. It may be anecdotal, but all the complaints I've ever seen about broadband/fibre in the US have been in relation to local monopolies and the general fragmentation of the nation-wide network. In most EU countries, we have laws that force networ…

> The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse.

We have access to cable internet and shortly fiber (from Metronet). We have some friends in an established (and not poor mind you) neighborhood not 2 miles away that doesn't even have cable run. They can't get ANY internet if it's not wireless.

It baffles my mind.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#57

Post by [deleted] »

badsoftware wrote: post #2

I 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.

[deleted]

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#58

Post by zamalek »

pcurve wrote: post #38
Arubis wrote: post #22

That’s…not terrible? Getting broadband in rural America is rough, and the permissive atmosphere for monopolistic behavior by ISPs is maddening. Pricing for internet access is way worse than in East Asia or western and central Europe. Some folks can’t get real broadband at all, and they’re disproportionally lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. That’s not fair. These issues are real. But overall, 12th sounds…prett…

It's shockingly good. I'm actually very proud of this statistic. Most won't see material difference between 200mbps vs #1 spot of 250mbps. It's negligible. However. I think there's a rather huge sampling bias, because the data is gathered from people who come to Speedtest.com to run the test.

I'd also be more interested to the the first or fifth percentile rankings. I'd bet that we do pretty poorly, especially in terms of the 10mbps benchmark.

Edit: these stats also exclude people who have no internet at all (which is a subset of speed test users, but an important subset).

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#59

Post by DamnYuppie »

trothamel wrote: post #5
hokumguru wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

The top 3 - Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR), and Monaco - are smaller than Rhode Island, the smallest state - even when you add them together.

LOL they are smaller than the Dallas/Ft. Worth area alone!

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#60

Post by arbitrage »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #33
Arubis wrote: post #22

That’s…not terrible? Getting broadband in rural America is rough, and the permissive atmosphere for monopolistic behavior by ISPs is maddening. Pricing for internet access is way worse than in East Asia or western and central Europe. Some folks can’t get real broadband at all, and they’re disproportionally lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum. That’s not fair. These issues are real. But overall, 12th sounds…prett…

We moved to a small rural community where a T1 isn't even available. I can get a 3Mb DSL connection or satellite. I have both because I need to redundancy. I did call to see what it would cost to have 'real' internet brought out here. They were happy to bring out a fiber line from the nearest town to serve our area. But it was going to cost me around $5k/mo with a 3 year contract for a 10Mb dedicated line. It's cheap…

If a complicated and highly capable internet connection was important to you, why did you move to place where you almost certainly wouldn't be able to get it?
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