According to the Communications Workers of America, the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in terms of broadband speed, and it's getting worse.
The CWA said that visitors that had tested their DSL, cable or FIoS connection at SpeedMatters.org, had generated data that indicated that the average broadband connection was several times slower than in Asia or Europe. The union produced a state-by-state survey, with each state's page headlined with "[State's name] and United States falling behind".
For example, one of the states with the fastest median broadband speed, New York, weighed in at an average speed of 3.44 Mbits/s. That outranks even so-called wired states like California, whose large expanses of rural land and lack of fibre-to-the-home offerings dragged down its median speed to 1.52 Mbits/s. The median U.S. download speed? 1.97 Mbits/s.
The CWA went on to say that it felt that the test was "too long" for dialup users, which would only exacerbate the problem. Want to check the data out for yourself? Then surf over to the speedmatters.org page, complete with state-by-state and even zip code-by-zip code data. A CWA spokeswoman says the site currently uses stored data, but will be dynamically linked to the speed test in a few days.
The comparisons with geographically small, tech-crazy countries is grim:
"Here's the main takeaway: the U.S. is falling far behind other industrialized nations with average real-time download speed in the U.S. at a mere 1.9 megabits per second (mbps) and median upload speed was just 781 kbps," according to the CWA. "The best available estimates show average download speeds in Japan of 61 mbps, in South Korea of 45 mbps, in France of 17 mbps and in Canada of 7 mbps."
I can vouch for France, at least. Having spent a weekend in Paris a few months ago (I was living in England at the time) the French offer outrageous packages of 24-Mbit ADSL2+ plus video for prices of 30 euros or so. The appeal of sipping a fine French red while reclining with a high-speed broadband is appealing, no doubt.
But back to the problem at hand. What to do? The CWA recommends six steps: establish a national policy goal of a national infrastructure supporting at least a 6-Mbit connection by 2010; develop public and private partnerships to build it out; improve data collection techniques to better assess the problem; require companies to describe their services accurately; require the universal service fund (USF) to fund broadband as well as phone service; and preserve an "open Internet," or the right of consumers to surf sans censorship or favor to any particular site or technology (AKA "net neutrality").
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June 25, 2007 10:10 PM
The reason we have a slow internet is that government regulations severely limit competition especially in the final mile to our houses.
The union wants more government interference which will only make the problem worse.
Governments never give up power so I see no hope of the situation changing.
June 26, 2007 2:05 PM
I think the biggest problem is that the we still use alot of analog-type equipment/connections in this digital world. For example,cable companies have already stated that analog channels suck up majority of the available bandwidth that their infrastructure can support. We are still putting copper cables in the ground. Copper can be used for digital, but it's no comparison to possible speeds on fiber. Remember, when it comes to speed you are only as fast as the slowest medium.
It will only get worse before it starts getting better. We are in the digital age. We need to get into the mindset that digital is the way to go. Drop the analog stuff if possible.
June 26, 2007 2:55 PM
@Jake: Forgive my skepticism here, but what Union are we talking about? It's an argument I hear often from broadband companies that somehow government regulation is keeping last-mile competition out of the marketplace, but considering there are only a handful of companies competiting for that cabling and only a handful of companies are willing to pay to lay the cable, I think the problem isn't government regulation, but a lack thereof - the companies that own all of the cable are so large that no one CAN compete with them, and no one's willing to. So instead they settle for renting it out from the larger telecomms, leaving the consumers and businesses that need internet access with fewer choice as a result of that lack of regulation, not greater. It's almost inverse of what it should be.
June 26, 2007 4:58 PM
I doubt anything that either the government or companies can do is going to cause us to to catch up in the short term. The big issue with the difference in broad band speeds has to do with the population concentrations. Most of the countries with blazingly fast speeds listed above have the vast majority of their populations highly concentrated. Canada may be spread out over a vast area but nearly all of their population lives in a handfull of cities within close proximity to the border. Same thing goes for sweeden and finland they are large countries but with very dense population clustering, lots of apartments and small neighborhoods. American urban sprawl makes stringing the amount of fiber optic and backbone cable as well as extremely high quality last mile cabling prohibitively expensive. All one has to do is consider the number of switch's, repeaters, and miles of cable in the U.S. per capita compared to those other countries listed above to see why we are so far behind.
October 7, 2007 8:33 AM
This is truly outrageous indeed, Verizon FIOS offers 40-50Mbps but that even depends what location your in. When i came to the U.S for business matters I immediately notice the difference on the speeds. I agree with Patrick in the sence that we are in the digital age, Stated of the art equipment would satisfy more consumers for their money.