Well browsing my normal rss feeds I came across this post on Switched. It reads
The Communications Workers of America recently released a survey of national broadband speeds and penetration and, perhaps not surprisingly, Alaska was ranked dead last in Internet speed. The average download speed across the state was a miserly 0.8 megabits per second (mbps), barely fast enough to stream a YouTube video without hiccups. By comparison, the fastest average speeds in the rest of the United States were found in Rhode Island, where a speedy 6.8 mbps is the norm, which lets you download a song in less than 10 seconds
Of course, these speeds pale in comparison with other nations. Japanese surfers get average download speeds of 63 mbps, and even the French get 17 mbps. However, American averages are pulled down due to the 15 percent of the population still connecting via ancient dial-up networks.
Now perhaps to you that does not seem bad. But to me it sucks. I download so much stuff in one day I kill my little 3mb connection. But as I kept reading my rss feeds I came across another bandwidth related post.
This one via slashdot reads
US Broadband Won’t Catch Up With Japan’s For 101 Years
An anonymous reader writes
“Internet speeds of users nationwide shows that the United States has not made significant improvements in deploying high-speed broadband networks in the past year, and if the average US Internet speed continues to improve only at the same rate it did from 2007 to 2008, the country won’t catch up with Japan’s current download speed for another 100 years, according to findings released by the Communications Workers of America’s (CWA’s) Speed Matters campaign.”
With enough statistical mangling, nearly anything can be presented as plausible, but that’s not enough to cover up my envy of Asian broadband speeds.
[Source: Slashdot]
The irony in this? I was calling the cable company to see if the house we might be moving to can get there nice new 20mb service. No luck there… Stuck with AT&T’s crappy service.
Anyway…What are your average download speeds?