The Fastest ISPs In the US

adeelarshad82 writes "PCMag recently put Internet browsing speeds to the test to see which ISP was the fastest. The results were based on a quarter million tests run between May 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, by more than 6,000 users. The tests were carried out using SurfSpeed, which takes into account the complete, real-world download time of a web page to a browser. According to the results, Verizon's FiOS took the top spot as the nation's fastest ISP, with a SurfSpeed score of 1.23 Mbps. Interestingly though, of all the regions where Verizon's FiOS is available, its dominance is only seen in the northeast and the west, whereas cable service from Cox and Comcast won out in the southern region. Moreover, cable through Cox and Optimum Online beat AT&T's fiber optic service in the nationwide results, with SurfSpeeds of 1.14Mbps, 1.12Mbps, and 1.06Mbps respectively. The worst results mostly consisted of DSL providers, bottoming out at 544 Kbps from Frontier and going up to 882Kbps by Earthlink. Other interesting facts noted in the test were that broadband penetration was highest in Rhode Island and lowest in Mississippi, while the average Internet bill was highest in Delaware and lowest in Arkansas."

Re:Only 1.23 Mbps?

[gblackwo]

Maybe that is after the speedboost or whatever wears off. Speedboost is not a friend of gaming, in an environment where the players are the hosts, and their bandwidth is being tested quickly to determine the best host, often it is someone with speedboost type buffing.

Re:Only 1.23 Mbps?

[Anonymous Coward]

That 10Mbps doesn't take into account limitations at the other end. Sure, you might have 10Mbps available. But if the guy you're trying to download from doesn't or if he has some lag issues then you aren't going to get 10Mbps.

Latency more important than bandwidth

[kelarius]

Any more I find network latency to be alot more important to me than the actual throughput of my connection. Being able to use my remote service software without as much lag is proving to be more useful to me than being able to download all the porn on the internet at 20 Mbps. I am quite happy with my current provider for that.

6,000 SurfSpeed Users

[countertrolling]

I would like to know how much more spam they are getting now. Nice data harvester. I knew the article was a fraud when it said,"...cable and phone companies compete to provide fast connections..." What they possibly compete for are exclusive franchises.

I bet if you block the ad servers, your speed would double

Re:Latency more important than bandwidth

[John Hasler]

> Thank you for saying this. I constantly tell people here that their speed
> doesn't mean crap if their latency, or real speed, is bad.

You are also oversimplifying. Both speed and latency (which is not "real speed") matter. Which matters most depends on the specific situation. When I'm downloading a Linux distribution I want throughput. I rarely care much about latency, but for gamers it's critical.

Re:Only 1.23 Mbps?

[TheRaven64]

In this case, giving the number as throughput is meaningless. Most of the time when I am browsing, I am getting 0KB/s, because I am not downloading anything when I am reading a page. Loading a largish text-only page (the current /. poll results) takes under a second. According to my network monitor, this was a tiny spike to 140KB/s. If this had been a spike half as wide at 280KB/s, it would have made absolutely no subjective difference to me. If, on the other hand, the DNS server had taken 3 seconds to respond and the round trip time to the server had been 5 seconds, this would have made a big difference even if the actual transfer had still remained the same.

Simply dividing the size of the page by the amount of time taken to fetch the page is misleading, because the size of the page is largely irrelevant to the total speed in this case. Loading a 1KB page takes almost the same amount of time as loading a 100KB page. If you want to measure the latency, give average latency figures. If you want to measure the throughput, give throughput figures.

As another example, if I go to iPlayer and click on one of their HD streams, it takes a couple of seconds to start playing, but then the network is constantly active for 1GB or more of data. I'm using far more than 1Mb/s (which is not quite enough for the SD streams) for an hour, but according to their tests my line would probably only have been rated at around 1-2Mb/s.

Re:Only 1.23 Mbps?

[dirtyhippie]

Uh, right. Your dialup is half as fast as broadband. And you used the same methodology (the program they wrote which takes into account all sorts of things) to determine that, of course.