Image courtesy: http://www.hometoys.com
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has waited with frustration for a page to load or a video to download, but the U.S. has shockingly slow internet speeds. America trails other industrialized nations, in many cases by a large margin, when it comes to bandwidth. The median US download speed is 1.67 Mbits a second. The average Japanese download speed is 61 Mbits a second. Yowza. That’s one heck of a gap. The reasons behind this gap are complex, but the disparity is at least partially due to a lack of competition and subsequent motivation on the part of ISPs to step their game up. While this type of thing won’t cause a mass exodus to Japan, it might call for a re-examination of our country’s networking. A little OC3 love here and there would be much appreciated.
