The U.S. may be winning world speed records in swimming at the Olympics, but not in average Internet speeds. According to a new report, the country that invented the Internet has now sunk to 15th worldwide in the percentage of the population subscribing to broadband.
According to the recently released Second Annual Speed Matters report from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the U.S. has “not made significant improvements in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet” over the past year, and continues to fall behind other countries.
A Sample of 230,000
The report said about 230,000 people in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, went to the speedmatters.org site to take an Internet speed test, and those results were used to determine the average speeds overall. The results indicated that the median download speed in the U.S. was 2.3 megabits per second. Japan was 30 times faster, with a median download speed of 63 Mpbs.
Other countries ahead of the U.S. include South Korea at 49 Mbps, Finland at 21 Mbps, France at 17 Mbps, and Canada at 7.6 Mbps. The reports notes that the average Japanese can download an entire movie in about two minutes, but it can take two hours or more here. The access cost in both countries, according to the Speed Matters report, is the same.
But the speed issue affects more than just how fast you can download movies, the report says. Innovations in telemedicine, education, public safety, and home-based businesses can be hindered by the lack of widespread high-speed connections.
The U.S. median upload speed was only 435 kilobits per second, the CWA said, “far too slow for patient monitoring or to transmit large files such as medical records.”
Slow Growth Rate
The growth rate of average download speeds is slow, the report…