It’s not news that US broadband speeds ain’t world-class.
For confirmation, check the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Cooporation and Development) extensive data sets culled from the advertised speeds of ISPs across many countries.
The spreadsheet I looked at, based on data from 2010, shows that US cable broadband performance is somewhere in the middle: ahead of France, Chile, Luxemborg, and Germany, but behind Estonia, Slovak Republic, Portugal and Finland.
Those last two, by the way, have the best speeds in Europe.
And let’s not even get into fiber bit rates.
The excuses made about our poor performance (by the usual suspects) include the factoid that our population density is lower compared to European countries and the Asian tigers.
And therefore the return on investment is not high enough, because of our oppressive regulatory environment, for our carriers to consider wiring up everybody.
Well, then how do you explain what Brough Turner has come up with in his post today?
Turner has taken data sets from Ookla, a company that collects actual test data from zillions of consumers, and using one of my favorite visualization apps, Google Public Data Explorer, to show that even at a higher-density state level, the US is looking bad.
Ookla’s data sets are built from on-the-line monitoring of packets using their Speedtest.net app. Because the data is tagged with location information from the ISP, we can view average speed results on a more granular level.
Using the Data Explorer and the Ookla data, I compared my small, high-density state of New Jersey with a few European countries (see above).
Related articles
- OECD Broadband Portal (oecd.org)
- Comparative broadband speeds – US loses again (broughturner.com)
- Google Public Data Explorer (google.com)
Wow, even the Czechs beat the US. Damn US telcos!