US Ranks 28th In the World In Average Wireless Broadband Speeds (dslreports.com) 66
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.
USA is 28th? (Score:2)
That means Canada is probably 280th.
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Usage caps? (Score:5, Informative)
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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Or divide the cap by the time period. When AT&T implemented caps prompting me to switch to Charter, it came out to about 768 kbits/s total.
Remember, its your FCC (Score:2)
The fiasco with net neutrality is plenty of evidence
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Making America #1 in ping times. The biggest! The most! The longest! And uncut!
And who beats America in download times!. Again, we've got the biggest most wonderful numbers!
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You lose again, when it comes to western countries you lag behind Australia, who are still at number one for being furthest from number one. Even corrupt borking up a national broadband system to fund their favourite corporate election winning players instead. Creating a broadband system that manages to devalue properties by up to 10% who will be stuck with second and third rate networks for decades (those who failed to vote right). It looks like the US is trying hard to get past Australia to the bottom in
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I was negligent in failing to bring up how American ISPs and mobile phone networks also strive to have the highest prices.
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Fake news.
We're probably 56th in reality.
Re: In other news, the US is very large (Score:1)
Yeah Straya is one tiny countries as well rightâ..... PS: rarely see anything under 50Mbps with Telstra 4G
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Is this a measure of broadband speed per square mile? Or per customer? Because I don't really care if broadband sucks in the middle of the Rockies. Not many people live out there and poor speeds per customer won't affect the average very much.
You could make a claim that with a few cities like London (very high population density), that would tip the statistics in the UK's favor. But Cyprus? Nicosia is nowhere as dense as New York, Chicago or LA.
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I think it is furlongs per fortnight ... or something.
Does it matter right now? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Chicken and Egg scenario. If you ONLY account for today, there will never be a tomorrow. New applications that require higher bandwidth won't be made if the resource isn't available, but that bandwidth won't be available if the applications don't demand it.
As someone who switched from a 30/6mbps to 1000/1000mbps line at home last year, let me tell ya... The amount of tools I run now that require high upload bandwidth expanded dramatically as soon as it became available to me. These same tools never even cro
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You can actually do that now or at least I can it would take about 7 hours to upload 60GB on the LTE connection I use for internet at home.
What sort of applications are you talking about?
about the most bw intensive thing I use is twitch some streams don't do transcoding so unless you have at least a 12Mbps connection or so you're SOL if you want to watch.
I keep considering using a cloud backup service but haven't picked one yet I want something where only we have the encryption key.
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A tautological argument.
If data rates today make a particular usage impractical is will not be common today. It would likely be common, if the data rates supported it.
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Not quite.
A common annoyance at something being difficult or impossible would be here today - remember, NEED is the mother of invention. So the question is really, is there something online you find yourself constantly saying, "I really wish I could just ..."? I saw a photographer commenting about sending RAW files home while in the field, which is a good example of needing both good speed and a high/unlimited usage cap. Going back to my own comment near the top, imagine sending home RAW files with a 2 GB m
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I find my problems in this regard (as an American) to be data caps rather than total speed. I know people in other countries and I don't really see them taking advantage of the improved speed or lack of bandwidth caps.
Even with my own landline service I am not using it to it's full potential. I don't pay for the fastest level of service because I don't have a use for it.
Data caps are the real thing holding back wireless use in America.
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> You keep talking about phones.
Unless you are in the middle of Montana, you don't need to lean on wireless for anything else. Wired will always be faster, more reliable, and more secure for a myriad of reasons.
Wired is still easily 10x faster.
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This whole discussion is about mobile usage. If they each have devices, each device has its own 10Mbps connection, which leads me back to my initial question: what are they doing that needs more?
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I live in Georgia. All of my politicians are bought and paid for by ATT, Verizon, Comcast and ....one other ... Frontier??.
They are scum who don't care about us. They throw us a bone every once in a while, but make REAL changes to better their constituency? AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Fuckers. I try to vote out the assholes but you see, I live where having a 'D' by your name is suicide (hopefully Ossoff will change that.) We have had trouble getting change.
The dumb hicks I live near listen to Political Talk Radio and have Fox News on all the time and think 'gubberment regulations are bad. They hurt jobs. They stop growth.' because they are told by the talking heads who make tens of millions of dollars by being lying Trolls - like Hannity, O'Reilly, Rush, that transsexual- Anne Coulter, and others.
See... I was OK with what you were saying, and agreed with it until the end there. I live in a likewise "R"- only state where people just vote straight-party tickets without learning about issues.
Unfortunately, your comment on Anne Coulter at the end can be taken two ways:
1) You're comparing her to transsexual as an insult because Transsexual is bad.
2) Her quality as a woman judged by how she looks. (you didn't mention that O'Reilly has a face that looks like it's been barraged by a bb gun, or Rush being
Uhh (Score:1)
USA USA USA
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Ironically these were the only three characters that managed to get through over US wireless broadband.
JDPowers ranks us at Number 1 (Score:2)
Bogus Corporation Excuse (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Australia has much larger coverage "holes", compare Telstra Australia [nextmedia.com.au] coverage with Verizon US [verizonwireless.com] coverage.
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You are missing the point.
Compare single large cities to each other instead of countries and you will STILL see American cities lagging (heh) behind their counterparts in the rest of the world. What is the excuse for not getting good coverage or speed in New York City? In Seattle? In Phoenix?
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Which cities are you comparing to which cities? It's essentially impossible to find an apples to apples comparison. Not to mention the fact that broadband providers are required to distribute cost over much larger areas than other places.
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I live in Nashville, we have both Google Fiber ($70/mo) and ATT Gigapower ($80/mo) both of which offer bidirectional 1Gb/s connections with no data limits.
And do you know why you have ATT Gigapower? Because you have Google Fiber.
ATT could bring Gigapower to me if they wanted to, but without competition from Google they have no incentive.
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ATT could bring Gigapower to me if they wanted to, but without competition from Google they have no incentive.
They haven't even bothered to bring DSL to me like We The Taxpayer paid them to do, and they were charging me $50/mo for a POTS line and then it went down and they told me they couldn't come out to fix it for six weeks. ATT can DIAF
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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.
So they have 1/10th the number of people using the service and you wonder why their average speed is higher?
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.
Finland [wikipedia.org]: 130,000 sq mi, population 5M
Norway [wikipedia.org]: 148,000 sq mi, population 5M
USA [wikipedia.org]: 3,800,000 sq mi, population 325M
So a country that's 30 times larger with 65 times more people on average has worse broadband. Turns out scaling is a REALLY hard problem. Notice how there's no country larger than the US with better broadband.
The fact of the matter is it's just impossible to compare these tiny, hom
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When the comparison is favorable, you never hear the end of it. When the comparison is unfavorable, it becomes "impossible to compare".
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What are the distributions? (Score:2)
What do the distributions across entire national populations look like? Averages only convey a partial view of the true distribution. Does the distribution include all households or just those with internet access? I would like to see a metric like percentage of all households with access speeds above a given threshold, like 25Mbps. That distinction between high and low speeds is perhaps more practical than how much higher than 25Mps access speeds can reach. Alternatively, average ping times or percent
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Also, if only 10% of an African country has broadband, but those who have it have very high speed, that country would still rank higher than the US in this report. Perspective is everything.
But we make up for it... (Score:2)
by having the most IPv4 addresses of any country in the world!
It's not a race (Score:2)
You don't win the Internet by having the fastest download speed.
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26 Mb/sec vs. 10.7 Mb/sec (Score:2)
What mobile applications requires client download speeds of either 10.7 OR 26 Mb/sec? I mean we're talking about wireless broadband, right?
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What mobile applications requires client download speeds of either 10.7 OR 26 Mb/sec? I mean we're talking about wireless broadband, right?
Agree. I can stream 3 HD videos at the same time when I hotspot my phone for other devices. I can run a VDI session with no problem at all. I can't think of any limitations that stop me from what I need to do on a daily basis.
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What mobile applications requires client download speeds of either 10.7 OR 26 Mb/sec? I mean we're talking about wireless broadband, right?
Not all wireless internet use is mobile. There is also a category which we name Fixed Wireless, which is pretty much just what it sounds like. Since AT&T has not brought DSL to my address like we paid the Telcos to do, and Mediacom has not bothered to cover the part of my road that I live on with cable (though the road is a loop road, and both ends of the road have cable and DSL) my only reasonable option (as in, I don't have to pay for mileage, and I live some fifteen miles from the CO) with more oomph
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Now granted, I do live in the sticks, but the road I live on does literally have DSL and cable at both ends. Fuck the telcos, and fuck the cable companies too. Fuck them a whole bunch.
You forgot to indicate how far it is from your property to the end of your street, and if there is a municipal boundry between your house and those with DSL and/or Cable service...
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You forgot to indicate how far it is from your property to the end of your street, and if there is a municipal boundry between your house and those with DSL and/or Cable service...
It's a couple of miles one way, and five miles the other way. One of the road probably crosses a municipal boundary, but the other end does not. The road itself is only paved because some guy who lives out here became county commissioner. Pretty sure he or one of his relatives started the Peterson fire [ca.gov] which is named after the road which I believe is named after him, by mowing in the middle of the day, whee! We knew that it was caused by midday mowing while it was still going on, even, but Cal Fire still sa