Average Broadband Speed in US Rises Above 50 Mbps For First Time (techcrunch.com) 108
Internet speeds are getting faster in the United States, especially in cities such as Kansas City, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix, according to a new Speedtest Market Report. The report, by Ookla's popular service, found that fixed broadband customers saw the biggest jump in performance this year with download speeds achieving an average of over 50Mbps for the first time ever. The result marks a 40 percent increase since July 2015. From a TechCrunch report: That average, 54.97 megabits per second is 42 percent higher than the same period last year, and upload jumped even more -- 18.88 is 51 percent higher year over year. This is all based on the 8 million or so daily tests conducted on Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound. Comcast Xfinity took the honors for fastest speed on average, but its 125 megabits wasn't that much higher than the competition: Cox with 118 and Spectrum with 114. [...] On mobile, Verizon and T-Mobile are tied for first place with 21 megabits and change download speed on average, though the latter beats the competition by a long shot with upload speeds averaging 11.59 megabits. Poor Sprint, though.
This (Score:5, Funny)
It's the server, not the broadband (Score:2)
I can't imagine any home user being routinely constrained by their ISP's highest broadband download limit. Even if you have only 10 MBPS, that's enough to have 2 Netflix movies playing simultaneously and still surf, talk on a VOIP phone, send/receive email, and play music from Spotify. All at the same time. There just aren't many servers from which you are likely to downloading data that will give you more than 10 MBPS.
ISP's are marketing speed as if it's the valuable commodity. But we don't really hav
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4k streaming is a thing these days. Netflix recommends 25Mbps. I imagine the majority of people don't have more than 1 4k TV today (though a significant minority will), but a 4k stream + some HD streams for other TV / browser use + miscellaneous use simultaneously isn't unreasonable. That means 50 is about the right capacity.
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Just old fashioned I guess. I've have 4k when they pry my remote from my cold dead hand.
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I had over 25 Mbps until AT&T started throttling back in May 2016. .... I had almost forgotten why I dropped Uverse TV a few years ago until I saw the 18 minutes of advertising per half hour of program standard again.
And AT&T told us then that we could not have an internet package without a cap unless we committed to a one year contract for television service too.
We moved to Uverse from DSL so we could have two people in an MMORPG while a third person watched Netflix. Y
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They care about speed... but they might not be caring about high speed. Probably the most frequent use of speedtest is when you are having performance problems, so if anything it's probably under-reporting the speed.
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People who want to test out their new fast internet. They are the people that will run several tests in a row. Some people may go to speedtest if they are having problems, but most will just call their cable company.
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And what does your cable company tell you to do when you call them with a problem? In the past, comcast has told me to run a test using ... Speedtest. And how quickly do most problems get fixed? Seems to take a LONG time with LOTS of testing ("switch off your router for half an hour, test, call us back and get a different customer service rep who will tell you to do the same thing all over again, etc").
I'm not saying that Speedtest is graven in stone as the absolute authority of speed, but it sure doesn'
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Because everyone with crappy low-end DSL and dialup have long since given up on speedtests. Who cares if you're getting 500 or 600 kbps downstream, the net is built for 10 mbps or more now.
Last time I tried doing a speedtest the download needle didn't even budge, and the upload timed out.
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Re:Pretty Sound? (Score:4, Insightful)
*looks out window*
So this is what Seattle looks like? Weird, can't see the Space Needle from here.
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You can't really judge consumer speeds by business speeds. Some ISPs are really braindead when it comes to this. They will refuse to offer businesses the same services that are available to consumers next door.
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I've generally found speedtest pretty reliable. Results are reproducible and correlate with what I'm paying for, and with back of the envelope calculations of actual download times.
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It doesn't matter if their tests are accurate down to a single byte if everyone with connections below, say, 2 mbps never even bother testing their speed because it is always 'Too slow'.
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I tested the most when I was on DSL and paying for 3mbs and getting 760kbs.
I'd like to see it substantiated that "people with fast connections test a lot and people with slow connections don't". Yes, there are some dick-wavers who need to see what their fiber connection is giving them, but if your connection is "fast enough" generally you aren't testing.
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"This is all based on [...] Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound."
I tried reading this aloud and couldn't keep a straight face.
According to the headline, this is just the first time. Next time they'll do even better!
I call fould (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I call fould (Score:5, Funny)
Re: I call fould (Score:3, Funny)
300 baud modem? My family of 50 has to share a connection, which is just cousin Cletus shouting "one" and "zero" from the top of a telegraph pole and listening for a response from cousin Billy-Joe standing on Comcast's roof.
...and mirrors (Score:4, Funny)
My family has to stack wood so we can emit a burst of one's and zero's with our signal fire. The baud rate is terrible, and we keep getting parity errors when the blankets burn through. The cost of enough cords of wood to keep the connection up is horrific.
To be fair, they did try to put a telegraph line in, but the Smith's down the road a ways cut and burned the poles trying to watch porn, and so that never came about.
Re:...and mirrors (Score:4, Funny)
Well at least he did get wood.
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Yeah, and having to jam my cell phone into the acoustic coupler is a real pain.
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If you are on DSL and live more than 3.5 km of loop from the DSLAM, you will never get faster than 5 Mbps [increasebr...peed.co.uk].
The average local loop length in the US is 4.25 km...
DSL has sped up incredibly for short loops, but for long loops there won't be much improvement. Either someone has to build DSLAMs closer to the houses, FTTx, etc.
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I'm fascinated by all of these cable operators that seem to be leaving money on the table. Everywhere I've lived since the late 90s has had respectable cable modem service or something even better.
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I and my neighbors are nowhere near 50mb, I have the fastest and it is just 3mb's
This is an "average" meaning your puny 3mb is being lumped in with people on 1 gig fiber. The data is heavily skewed as a result.
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Tampa, FL (Score:2)
They have service upward of 250/250, but not willing to pay that much a month.
Time Warner Maxx (Score:4, Informative)
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Thanks, Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: Thanks, Google (Score:4, Informative)
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In the telcos case they did fiber projects in order to get grant money, and Verizon sold off their fiber business to Frontier after the grant money ran low.
Which illustrates how the grant money is being poorly allocated. Companies shouldn't be able to pull a profit directly from the grants, but should be using them to acquire infrastructure that they couldn't/wouldn't otherwise get. It sounds like they were just treating the grants as free money because they were given too much or there weren't sufficiently durable strings attached to them. Why would they sell off an upgraded, and paid for, fiber network?
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it could be worse, you could be on satellite
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My TW service is 100/10. I can get faster than that if I want to pay more.
Lots of data does not mean representative (Score:4, Insightful)
This is all based on the 8 million or so daily tests conducted on Speedtest's website and apps, by the way, so the data is pretty sound.
So how many people on the same old DSL line run a speed test to check that there speed is the same as it was 10 years ago? People use speed tests when they got a new line, they've upgraded it or they're troubleshooting. They don't do it at random. Our national statistics here in Norway is based on collection of subscription statistics, which seems far more reliable as users would probably complain if they didn't get what they paid for. Last figures are 1,914,431 broadband connections, average of 40.2 Mbps with a median of 25.6 Mbps.
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A few months ago a /. story stated that US internet speeds were lower than most European countries. Everyone believed those numbers.
Now the US numbers are higher than Europe and nobody believes them.
Bottom line is that everyone's speeds are going up; whoever had the most recent survey wins.
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There's always going to be some outlier that says "no mine is great" or "no mine actually sucks".
Plus, all journalism is agenda driven these days.
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Since most people are troubleshooting, odds are speedtest is under-reporting actual speeds, not over-reporting.
Except Windstream; the headwind provider... (Score:1)
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I'm paying $99/mo for my 6Mbps, with 300 GB transfer, from Digital Path. DSL and Cable are both on the next road over, but not mine.
Telcos and Cable Companies should be forced to expand service to all paved roads if they're going to get a monopoly. That'll show 'em.
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I'm paying $99/mo for my 6Mbps, with 300 GB transfer, from Digital Path. DSL and Cable are both on the next road over, but not mine.
Telcos and Cable Companies should be forced to expand service to all paved roads if they're going to get a monopoly. That'll show 'em.
You really need to make friends with someone on the next road over and set up a few parabolic antennas.
How is this measured? (Score:5, Interesting)
They say this is "broadband" speeds, but broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads [gizmodo.com].
So, someone could be sneaky and say 'oh, those 10 Mbps connections aren't broadband anymore', and you just drop out the lowest numbers, and miraculously the average goes up.
Schools were using this trick by keeping the poorly performing students from taking standardized testing to raise their test averages.
Our connection (Score:2)
I'm paying about $140/mo for 30/5 with a static IP via DSL.
They're hanging fiber from the poles now (apparently burying it is too expensive), but I don't know if they'll actually offer us anything faster; there's only one pipe out of here. My middle son is on optical already, and he's running at a whopping 10/1. I think they're just tired of maintaining all that old copper. Lots of lightning here, keeps the repair people running hard all summer.
Also, govt redefining scientific facts (Score:2)
> broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads.
Which is itself an example of government redefining scientific truth, not unlike the Indiana Pi bill. Baseband, passband, narrowband, and broadband have actual meanings, they describe the physics of how the connection works. 100 Mbps ethernet uses one channel, therefore it is narrowband. Gigabit ethernet uses four channels, so it's broadband.
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broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads.
Which is itself an example of government redefining scientific truth
Umm... What "scientific truth" would that be, exactly?
I think you're deeply confused.
Baseband means 1 channel, broadband multiple (Score:2)
Fast ethernet uses one channel. It is therefore baseband. That's a fact. It's not a matter of opinion. Claiming that ethernet isn't baseband, but rather broadband, is just like claiming that ethernet is wifi. That's simply false.
Baseband vs broadband are determined by whether a signal is multi-channel or single-channel, and have nothing to do with speed. "Defining" ethernet as broadband is precisely the same as "defining" Pi as 4.
More about baseband vs broadband transmission:
http://www.pearsonitcertificat [pearsonitc...cation.com]
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So it's the word "scientific" that's confused you...
A few other points: The term "broadband", in this context, means something other than what you want it to mean. If you have a complaint about how language works, you'll need to get over it. No one is "Defining ethernet as broadband". You came up with that one all on your own.
Again: What "scientific truth" are they "redefining", exactly?
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Plus, we are talking about technology here. That means we are talking about engineering rather than science. People who love to feel smug about "being more scientific" love to muddle this stuff.
Here's the FCC announcement, Ethernet is broadband (Score:2)
> No one is "Defining ethernet as broadband".
Here's the FCC announcement where they said any connection greater than 25 Mbps one way and 3 Mbps the other is a broadband connection:
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub... [fcc.gov]
Obviously at 100 Mbps, that includes ethernet. So yes, the FCC has declared that Ethernet is broadband.
Yet it continues to be baseband, whether the FCC likes it or not.
Actually not marketing. A 1996 law creating regula (Score:2)
Actually it doesn't have anything to do with using "broadband" as a marketing term. It's from a 1996 law directing the FCC to create regulations "encouraging" ISP to deploy high-speed BROADBAND service to "underserved" areas. Congress meant "make them build infrastructure for HIGH SPEED service in rural areas". Apparently not knowing what "broadband" meant, Congresd required that ISPs build "broadband", which means the medium is shared by frequency (channel) rather than by time, such as TDMA or CMDA.
Anyw
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Ummm... Nowhere in your link will you find anyone "defining ethernet as broadband".
Obviously at 100 Mbps, that includes ethernet.
LOL, Wut? You may want to do a bit of reading. What you've written is completely incoherent.
I'm still waiting on this: What "scientific truth" are they "redefining", exactly? Or have you finally figured out that that particular claim was absurd nonsense?
Here's a reference for you. 10GBASEâ'LX4 (Score:2)
> Talk about redefining terms. Cite a reference that says broadband is defined that way.
Here's one easy to read explanation of baseband vs broadband:
http://www.pearsonitcertificat... [pearsonitc...cation.com]
See also most any physical networking standards document.
> What if my gig ethernet is optical? Am I now narrowband? How about optical 10Gb?
Early and simple optical networking standards were baseband (using a single channel or frequency). Faster and more current standards are often broadband (multiple frequencies). There
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They say this is "broadband" speeds, but broadband was redefined last year to require 25Mbps downloads [gizmodo.com].
So, someone could be sneaky and say 'oh, those 10 Mbps connections aren't broadband anymore', and you just drop out the lowest numbers, and miraculously the average goes up.
Schools were using this trick by keeping the poorly performing students from taking standardized testing to raise their test averages.
Actually, the Speedtest report directly says this is exactly what they are doing. The reported numbers only consider the top 10% of speeds for a given ISP for a given location. So, the number is definitely not an average, even given that the samples are not random, e.g., people with better connections might be more likely to try the Speedtest test.
So, the absolute speed number is not directly useful as a representation of the average or distribution of connection speeds. It may yield some insight after m
For the first time? (Score:3)
So do you think one day there will be a headline:
Keeping it on the down low. (Score:2)
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Trade you my 6mbps CenturyLink line with no hope of ever getting Google Fiber.
The local telco, one of the old school co-ops, was in the process of installing fiber links when CenturyLink bought it and stopped all infrastructure upgrades pending a cost/benefit analysis. Three years ago, seems like we lost the cost/benefit analysis.
Akamai says 15 Mbps (Score:5, Informative)
The Akamai State of the Internet Q1 2016 [akamai.com] has a US average Internet bandwidth of 15 Mbps, which is far more believable.
I agree that there are plenty of people in the US with 50 Mbps+ (I have that myself), but there are still a lot of people on the end of long DSL loops who will never get higher than 5 Mbps.
Why poor Sprint? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for LTE speed, the average of the other carriers is 21.2 Mbps down, 9.3 Mbps up. Sprint's is 15.8 Mbps down, 4.9 Mbps up, or 75% down and 53% up vs the other carriers. Unless you're streaming 4k video to your cell phone, or regularly shoot a lot of videos and insist that they be uploaded to cloud backup immediately, these differences simply don't matter. They're all "fast enough" - they correspond to a few seconds or even a split second difference in most use cases.
The speeds are to the point where consistency (better coverage, fewer dead spots) is a more important factor. And by that metric there's now only a 5% difference between the best and worst mobile carrier in the U.S. Hardly worth the 2x price Verizon wants for service. That's why I gambled and decided not to give up my unlimited plan on Sprint by switching carriers. Once your coverage reaches about 90% (which was where Verizon was at when Sprint was around 50%), you're pretty close to maxed out. There's simply not much more improvement you can make. Whereas Sprint at 50% had a lot of room for possible improvement. (Your experience will vary with location. I hear Sprint still sucks in the Bay Area.)
(And if you're curious, no I'm not a bandwidth hog. My monthly data use is usually down around 1-3 GB. Just every now and then I go on a business trip or vacation, and use my phone as a hotspot so I and my family/friends can get Internet on our laptops and tablets. I'd have to pay $15/GB for overage if I switched to Verizon. The month I used 112 GB would've cost me over $1500. No thanks.)
Biased data source. (Score:2)
have to wonder how much google influences? (Score:2)
You A'int Seen Nothin Yet (Score:2)
Frontier...... (Score:2)
http://www.speedtest.net/my-re... [speedtest.net] 1.5Mbps/down .37Mbps/up for $30/mo
With Frontier spending their profits on fighting municipal/community broadband competition I've really got to find an alternative out here...
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On frontier I have two 3.5 Mbps/down .75Mbps/up connections going into a load balancer. Does that count as 7/1.5? Both lines $19+$15