US lags behind world in broadband speeds

I want to see comparisons between Russia, China, Canada, US, Mexico, and India. Large populations, large land mass. That would be a real comparison. How about the European Union as a whole, too?

Exactly what SupAll said. The US Cant react to technological advances as quickly due to the size of the land mass.

Oh enough with the land mass crap. We have the capability to provide better connectivity, but we have terrible market conditions. There is so little competition that ISPs have no incentive to upgrade the value they are providing.

I live in south Orange County, CA and I pay $50 a month for 4mbps. That is pitiful and it has nothing to do with physical limitations on the infrastructure. Our raw infrastructure is great.

It’s the same problem with wireless carriers. High prices, crappy service. In the UK you can get residential broadband for £9 a month. You can also get weeks worth of 3G data on a (free) prepaid SIM for £5. I’d like to see that back in the US.

We can definitely do better (and some places that have FIOS 50Mb and Comcast 105Mb do) but there is no real way America will get the same speeds as small countries like Korea and Japan. Their entire countries could fit in one or two of our states. I would like to see how we compare to places like Russia, China and the other countries with huge landmasses.

Yes, we have large land mass … but we can take it one city at a time. We don’t have to cover the entire country. How about start with the major population areas like New York, L.A., Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.

I mean our average Download speed is only a little more than half of South Korea’s average Upload speed. That’s a huge difference.

It’s not a question of how much they are able to give us … it’s how much can the ISP’s charge for as little bandwidth as possible. It always comes down to corporate greed. What they don’t understand is that they are hurting their own company’s future since we as a nation are not advancing as fast as other countries.

pretty sad…

It is sad, but I don’t think you can compare south korea to US. I am from South korea and I live in Maryland. The state of maryland is bigger than whole south korea. This country is bigger and more populated than South korea. There has to be some break for that.

While the size of our country is a perfect valid and logical conclusion to the why, a part of me still wants to blame sh***y contracts that guarantees telecoms get paid by consumers whether they innovate or not. Honestly, At&t and Apple have been RAPING the marktet, so where is all this iPhone moolah going? Its going in someone’s pocket rather than being invested back into tech. And yes, I do know they really try to improve and expand… but tell me how much of a % of a telecom’s profits go back into improvements?

Excuses excuses. Since when do we compare ourselves to third world countries? It’s sad but not surprising if you travel around the world this is not a surprise and the same goes for the awful cell phone coverage in US vs most of the developed world. Keep making excuses and accepting the fact we are fast becoming irrelevant and a third world country.

And it is not just in communication see infrastructure and will be same not to mention transportation.

The problem with speedtest.net’s comparison, and your reporting of it, is that it doesn’t, at all, demonstrate that the US is falling behind. What it indicates is that most people are not taking advantage of higher speeds available.

Here’s my speedtest.net result:

http://twitpic.com/1rj23p

I’ve opted for a 35mpbs service from Cox. It cost me a bit more, but I wanted the speed. I’m now on par with just about anyone in South Korea, for only a bit more per month than my old connection cost me. If I wanted to pay even more, I could get up to 50mbps.

Most people have substantially higher speeds available to them, but have chosen not to take them because they don’t want to pay the cost.

Comcast already offers speeds up to 100MBPs on the download!!!

I want to see the benchmark for North Korea. We did save South Korea’s butt in the early 1950′s. We’ll alway lag behind the small countries that dont have to worry about miles of backhaul like we do. This is bunk journalism at its most indifferent.

Show me the size of the TRUNK CIRCUITS behind these access speeds before I will accept these numbers as relevant.

Just because you have an access circuit with the potential of transmitting at 100mb does not mean that you are going to be able to consume content at that level. The bottle necks being the truck circuits and the ingress circuit sizes of the content web site.

As a reference – earlier this year Verizon rejected the vendor responses on the cost for OC-768 interfaces (40Gb) for their trunk circuits due to costs. Instead of one interface they decided to deploy 4 each 10Gb ciruits to build their 40Gb backbone.
As my reasoning goes – I would like to inspect these other places to see their backbone trunk speeds.

After all if I built my own “Internet” inside of my basement and then claimed that I had 1Gb “access” because I was connected to an Ethernet switch – my findings would be disqualified because the scale of my Internet does not compare with the United States, which has more than 70M broadband connecitons and growing.

I’m not trying to start a political war, but for all of you that prefer to be coddled by our government and prefer oversight by them for everything, this is exactly what you get! There is absolutely no reason, none, that we should be at the bottom of this list! I live in the Washington/Baltimore corridor and Verizon FIOS is having a whale of a time getting all the permits, clearance from this committee or that committee, buying cable TV access rights and clearance, etc to get FIOS installed in my county. To be honest, I’m surprised that some of these companies even put up with all the crap they most go through only to have the FCC come back a year or two later and regulate something else on the telecoms. Bureaucracy and nothing else is what’s preventing us from being tops!

Ya, but Japan is the only country on that list ahead of the USA that is bigger than Texas. I’d like to see a chart that takes that same #, and multiplies by the sheer # of IP addresses- resulting in a total used bandwidth up and down… Pretty sure China and the USA will be on that much bigger list… – Matt Orley in Akron, OH

Look, net neutrality is just a way of implementing socialized data traffic. It will only lead to stunted growth of available bandwidth and overall lower quality. You can’t force ISPs to offer the same speed across the board and put a limit on the price. Guess what happens when you do that? Rationing. Price ceilings only lead to rationing (look up price ceilings if you don’t believe me). If ISPs don’t have the incentive to offer better service at a higher price, then it won’t happen. Period. Look at Comcast’s new high-speed plan – over 100 mbps for about $200 per month. You could pay $40 per month and get about 5 mbps with a different provider. So you have choice and there is competition between providers. Forcing Comcast to offer the top-tier service at $40 per month would not be sustainable. They have high costs associated with providing that level of service and if they can’t pay those costs (because the government forces it to charge a maximum of say $40), then the service won’t be offered. Part of the problem the ISPs are having is too much regulation and taxes; if they were more free and didn’t have to suffer through massive taxes, we would see a much larger roll out of new infrastructure and technology upgrades, which only leads to greater available bandwidth (speed).

So please, don’t throw this net neutrality crap around like it’s the answer to all the Internet-related problems because it won’t solve problems, it will only cause MORE problems.

Tell us something we don’t know. This is old news. The big corporations will continue to rape us as long as they can before upgrading to faster, more secure, and better broadband technology. They will be the last ones on the planet to upgrade.

You city folk got it good. I lived in Dallas for a good while, 6 mbps is the fastest service that I knew of available there. Now that I live north in a small town the best I can get is 1.5 mbps and that’s on a good day. I COULD get this new service I just found out about here: 3 whole mbps for 90 dollars a month!?! Fucking ridiculous! Don’t live in the country!

How much to we pay for our broadband in comparison to the rest of the world?

Ya know what’s really embarrasing? Australia is about to roll out fibre optic broadband. Same size as the US and a poofteenth of it’s population.

You no longer have excuses America.