East Coast Broadband Fastest In USA 363
Death Metal Maniac writes "The study, which was conducted by affordable-broadband advocacy group Speed Matters, found that the nine states with the fastest median download connections are all located on the East Coast. Rhode Island (6.8Mbps) and Delaware (6.7Mbps) have the fastest, and nearly triple the national median download speed of 2.3Mbps. Rounding out the Top 5 states are New Jersey (5.8Mbps), Virginia (5Mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6Mbps)."
flawed test (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
The states with the slowest median download speeds primarily are located in the Midwestern or Western regions of the United States, including Idaho (1.3Mbps), Wyoming (1.3Mbps), Montana (1.3Mbps) and North Dakota (1.2Mbps); Alaska had the slowest download speed (0.8Mbps). I
Is anyone surprised that small, densely populated states have higher download speeds than large, sparsely populated ones? It's the same argument that comes up every time worldwide broadband speeds are discussed: small and dense = easier to wire.
-Grey [silverclipboard.com]
Re:Competition (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it has more to do with which carriers are dominant in different regions.
Verizon is the successor to two of the regional operating companies spun off after the 1984 AT&T divestiture, Bell Atlantic, which covered the mid-Atlantic region, and NYNEX, which merged New England Telephone and New York Telephone. That means the east coast (north of Virginia) has much more FiOS penetration than the rest of the US.
Comcast also has a large presence in the northeast. Regardless of your opinion of their policies, Comcast has offered cable internet service for many years now.
So I suspect the higher speeds on the east coast have more to do with which providers serve these areas than anything else.
The cited study, by the Communication Workers of America, is based on tests taken by people who visited their web site the chance to measure their speeds. Well, I don't know about you, but I've never visited the CWA site, but I bet a lot of CWA members do, and I bet most of them have pretty high-speed connections. Studies like this with self-selected respondents have only minimal "external validity" since the results aren't based on random sampling methods. ("External validity" concerns whether the results of a study can be generalized to some larger universe of interest. In the case of the CWA study, they cannot.)
Re:geh (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right! Many palms to be greased. Unions. Pols. "Neighborhood activists". It is ungodly expensive to do anything in Boston (see Big Dig). Probably this is true of any large American city. And they wonder why those with the means move to the suburbs.
Re:New Jersey (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing wrong with NJ is the taxes, cost of property, and the state gov.
Beyond that it's a nice place to live. Everyone always thinks all of NJ is inner-city Newark because that's all the see from the Parkway and Turnpike because of trees and sound dividers, or when they land at Newark International Airport, or look at us across the river.
When it fact it's a nice place with plenty of trees and forests.
Some people I know were talking about how they drove to NJ for the first time from out west. They were flabbergasted when they realized they'd been driving in NJ for over an hour and had stopped at a few places in NJ. They said they never saw that portion of NJ on the TV.
Re:Only 6.8Mbps? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oblig Matrix... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad someone has 6.8 Mbs...just hope they don't actually use it. DPI, caps, throttling....these speeds only apply if you use them for services the telco wants you to use them on.
Millions in gov't subsidies and right-of-ways thru your property and all I got was this lousy duopoly.
Re:Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because major cities have poor people in them who can't afford FiOS, whereas suburbs are comparatively rich.
"High speed" (Score:4, Insightful)
I live 5 minutes away from MAE-East so you'd think internet access would cost less here, but I'm paying $60 per month for 15/2. I'd be willing to bet that the recent surge in advertised speeds has more to do with marketing than capacity.
At some point a few years ago ISPs realized that most web services don't have the bandwidth on their end to serve lots of users with 15 megabit connections, so they'd never actually have to provide all that bandwidth. They decided they were going to use speed purely as a marketing gimmick and started selling "15 megabit" connections with no capacity to back them up. That's why they hate BitTorrent so much -- it forces them to deliver the product they advertise (what an insane concept!). They oversell bandwidth by a factor of 100 and then turn around and label people who actually use the capacity they pay for as "bandwidth hogs". It's pitiful.
retarded statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
its like the article on slashdot awhile back comparing high speed in the far east to the usa: pointless
what you are really comparing is population densities
notice something interesting about the states listed? they are all small, compact, and densely populated
new york state, for example, is sparsely populated, mostly, but i'll bet you speeds in the city and on long island are as high as anywhere else
so new york state isn't listed, or california, but that doesn't mean a damn thing, because all you are doing is taking note that these states have large areas that are low in population density, and therefore broadband penetration
Downloads... not that important. (Score:3, Insightful)
After you get up to a couple megabits a second of download speed, who cares?
What I would REALLY appreciate is some upload speed. I understand why the situation is the way that it is ("All your base are belong to us.") but I'd love to be able to do really high quality voice conferencing.
Also, I notice that no one here is complaining about quality, per se. That's good and it's a pretty big difference from attitudes ten years ago.
--Richard
Re:Rest of the world (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya that's what irks me about all uplinks... 1mbit would have been plenty in the 90's, but this is the age of P2P and VPN and telework. It's real f'ing annoying to have to wait 2 hours just to transfer a big document between my home and office PCs.
If only I could run an ethernet cable to the local exchange down the street :P How hard could it possibly be ?
Re:geh (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know. Even if that's the case, I would wonder if Verizon intentionally had an ad agency do that, but maintained a level of plausible deniability.
They've changed their setup now, but it used to be that when you checked for FIOS availability, and FIOS was not available, it wouldn't tell you that. Instead, it would say, in great big letters, "Congratulations, Verizon Broadband is available in your area." And then it would point you towards their DSL services as though you were checking for that. I always thought it seemed intentionally misleading, like a classic case of the bait and switch.
Re:geh (Score:1, Insightful)
>it's just that some people (aka parents) refuse to upgrade.
Why not offer to pay for it yourself?