5 Sad Facts About America's Ridiculously Slow Internet

[rhoenix]

Anyone who’s ever stared glass-eyed at a Netflix video that won’t load or stuttered through a glitchy Skype call knows that the United States leaves its citizens starving for bandwidth. But the latest data in Akamai’s annual “State of the Internet” report presents some pretty depressing statistics about American’s slow, shitty internet.

In case you’re not familiar, Akamai is a cloud services company that counts giants like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter as clients. Those relationships yield data about internet traffic all over the world, including the details of connection speeds, cyberattacks, and network penetration. The latest report tells a tale of how far behind the US is in terms of upgrading infrastructure and ensuring internet faster speeds. And the US invented the damn thing.

America’s not even in the top 10 worldwide

If you want fast internet, you’d be better off moving to Latvia than settling down in middle America. Or South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ireland, Czech Republic, or Finland. The US isn’t even in the top 10 countries with the fastest average connection speeds worldwide.

In fact, Akamai only mentions the US in this part of the report to note that broadband adoption had dipped slightly (a “negligible 0.3 percent drop”) and to point out that “in the United States, 50 million people—or roughly 16% of the population—are not connected to the Internet.” Later in the report, Akamai points out that the global rank for the US is number 16.



The top slots this year, yet again, belong to Asia. South Korea’s internet is probably the best in the world. It ranks at the top of every list, namely the list of countries with average broadband speeds above 10 Mbps. A rollicking 79 percent of South Koreans enjoy speeds of 10 Mbps or greater. The US didn’t even make the list.

Don’t blame size

A lot of people blame slow US internet speeds on the size of the country. The internet does demand a physical infrastructure to carry packets of data from one side of the nation to another, and in more isolated areas, that infrastructure is more sparse, making it tougher to offer high-speed connections. It means that the whole country’s average speed gets brought down by these dead spots.

But the data tells a different story. Ironically, some of the most remote states in the country enjoy some of the fastest internet speeds. Utah’s internet is number six in the nation, followed by Washington, Oregon, and North Dakota. North Dakota!

Meanwhile, Virginia is only slightly larger than South Korea, but its internet is almost 25 percent slower on average.



US speeds are tragically far from “broadband”

Uncompetitive internet speeds is hardly news to US officials. Acknowledging the massive gaps in access to high-speed internet across the country, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently redefined broadband in an effort to compel internet service providers to build faster networks. It used to be 4 Mbps. Now it’s 25 Mbps.

Guess what? Not a single state can boast anything close to widespread speeds greater than 25 Mbps. In fact, none of them can even claim full broadband coverage according to the old definition.



So if you want to move to a state with pretty good internet, Delaware is the state for you. It’s also a great place to incorporate a tech company.

Mobile internet is even worse

So all the above statistics refer to terrestrial broadband. Surely, the US must be better on the mobile front? Nope. Akamai’s findings for the fastest mobile connections in the five major continental regions, ranked:

1. Europe: United Kingdom, 16.0 Mbps
2. Asia Pacific: Japan, 8.3 Mbps
3. South America: Venezuela, 6.3 Mbps
4. North America: United States, 3.2 Mbps
5. Africa: Morocco, 3.0 Mbps

Venezuela’s mobile internet speeds are almost twice those of the US. Venezuela is struggling to feed its citizens, but they can stream YouTube on their phones faster than the average American.

America is home to a ton of hacker activity

Nevertheless, the US is second only to China as the biggest exporter of attack traffic. This isn’t necessarily related to speed, and it’s hard to draw conclusions from Akamai’s data about internet security. But one thing stands out: A sizable proportion of cyberattacks worldwide originate in the US.

China accounts for 41 percent of global attack traffic, while the US accounts for just 13 percent. There’s not really a third place. Taiwan and Russia are neck-and-neck with 4.4 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. The report doesn’t offer much detail about the attacks themselves, but the data doesn’t lie. If you wanted to pick the top two belligerents in the ongoing global cyberwar, they would be China and the straggling United States.

Original report: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

This report kinda bothers me in a national pride kind of way; I mean, America was responsible for the Internet's birth and gestation, after all.

On the other hand, I think this also goes hand in hand with the "decaying infrastructure" perception and problem American has right now.

[frigidmagi]

Okay I got to point out that each of the top 10 are tiny nations where the populations are densely packed. Are they gonna have higher internet?

Yeah.

Because it's always easier to get everyone hooked up over a single mile then over 100 miles. Look compare us to nations with similar land mass and population density. Not nations with a 1/10th of our total area and 3 times our density.

[General Havoc]

There has never been a point in the history of the United States when there was not some vast panic ongoing about the decaying state of its infrastructure. And comparing a country the size of a continent with a third of a billion people to city states and tiny Nordic countries is disingenuous in the extreme. This is like those periodic handwringing indictments that moan about the fact that we have more crime than Iceland and more racial tension than Sweden. Clearly this augurs the impending crime waves to overwhelm the US and reveal our sociopathic national tendencies.

The US does indeed have slower internet than many countries. Does this article offer any explanation as to why? Does it provide the slightest shred of insight as to the mechanisms behind how broadband internet is established in a country, and by whom? Does it suggest remedies? Does it offer examples from successful implementations that should be followed? Does it offer anything whatsoever except the basic fact, context-free and without a single explanation or corresponding piece of evidence?

No, of course not. Because the US has slower internet than the rest of the world. The reasons are irrelevant. And stating empty facts about how the US sucks is its own reward.

[rhoenix]

Okay I got to point out that each of the top 10 are tiny nations where the populations are densely packed. Are they gonna have higher internet?

Yeah.

Because it's always easier to get everyone hooked up over a single mile then over 100 miles. Look compare us to nations with similar land mass and population density. Not nations with a 1/10th of our total area and 3 times our density.

That's a fair rebuttal; all the nations ahead of us in the rankings are much less populous, and therefore have less to deal with. A fairer comparison would be against nations of similar size and population density, if we were simply comparing ease of internet access.

My main issue is that the rate at which internet adoption and broadband infrastructure has progressed for various reasons in America. We had a head start, we should be doing better, dammit.

(And yes, I know that's purely a subjective thing.)

There has never been a point in the history of the United States when there was not some vast panic ongoing about the decaying state of its infrastructure. And comparing a country the size of a continent with a third of a billion people to city states and tiny Nordic countries is disingenuous in the extreme. This is like those periodic handwringing indictments that moan about the fact that we have more crime than Iceland and more racial tension than Sweden. Clearly this augurs the impending crime waves to overwhelm the US and reveal our sociopathic national tendencies.

The US does indeed have slower internet than many countries. Does this article offer any explanation as to why? Does it provide the slightest shred of insight as to the mechanisms behind how broadband internet is established in a country, and by whom? Does it suggest remedies? Does it offer examples from successful implementations that should be followed? Does it offer anything whatsoever except the basic fact, context-free and without a single explanation or corresponding piece of evidence?

No, of course not. Because the US has slower internet than the rest of the world. The reasons are irrelevant. And stating empty facts about how the US sucks is its own reward.

No, you make an excellent point here, in that there are no conclusions drawn in the article, no suggestions, and no plans for any of them. That's rather unhelpful for an article about such an issue, I certainly grant.

That said, I'll see if I can find data on why the rates of adoption and spread of broadband in America have been unimpressive. I'm predicting in advance that the answers won't be simple, but should at least be interesting reading.

[frigidmagi]

Because the profit in laying broadband is actually pretty bad. Plus you have to lay out a whole lot of broadband to get all the west hooked up for example. Hell think of how much would have to be set up just to get California.

[Lys]

There doesn't actually seem to be much in the way of correlation between size, population density, and average internet speeds. California is slightly smaller than Sweden with four times population, which gives it 4.4 times the population density. It should be all rights be significantly easier and more profitable to lay high speed internet in California than Sweden. The weather is more agreeable, the price of labour lower, and you get more customers per mile, yet Sweden's the one with the significantly faster internet. On the other hand North Dakota is the same size as Finland with less than a quarter of the population density, yet it manages slightly faster internet service. Even more dramatic, Virginia has a hundred times the area of Hong Kong and 1/85th the population density, yet is still faster on average.

It's interesting to see what happens when the two top ten lists are collated into a sort of World's Top 20 that treats each state in the Union as an independent nation:

Rank - Country - Mbps
1) South Korea - 22.2
2) Virginia - 17.7
3) Hong Kong - 16.8
4) Delaware - 16.4
5) Japan - 15.2
6) Sweden - 14.6
7) Switzerland - 14.5
8) District of Columbia - 14.4
9) Netherlands - 14.2
10) Massachussets - 14.2
11) Rhode Island - 14.1
12) Utah - 13.9
13) Washington - 13.3
14) Latvia - 13.0
15) Oregon - 12.9
16) Ireland - 12.7
17) North Dakota - 12.7
18) New York - 12.6
19?) New Hampshire - 12.5
20?) Connecticut - 12.5

Couldn't find a list of all 50 US states, but New Hampshire and Connecticut are mentioned in the report used in the OP and both of them are high enough to knock Finland and the Czech Republic off the top twenty. The slowest states are predictably Alaska with 7.4 Mbps, then Kentucky, New Mexico, and Arkansas, each with average connections speeds just below 8 Mbps. So you can see that when separated, the United States actually wind up all over the map in terms of internet speed. Some doing quite well and others quite poorly in both absolute and relative terms.

From personal experience i can say that service in Delaware is in fact fast and inexpensive, which would be great if not for the constant service interruptions. Nominally speaking the internet is significantly better here than what we had in Rhode Island, yet it's been far more troublesome for me because while the network is faster when it works, it can't handle the whole neighbourhood taking advantage of it at once, and so suffers regular hiccups when streaming. Appropriately, i suffered a fairly severe service slowdown while writing this post.

[General Havoc]

Sweden's population is, however, concentrated in about a quarter of the country, and while the same is true of California to a lesser extent, the quarter in question here is spread across a massive swatch of empty territory. Decent-size places like Lancaster City, Crescent City, or Placerville are hundreds of often-mountain-laden miles from any other major population center, leading to bottlenecks in service availability.

There's also a factor to consider regarding the internet having been invented here, and it's the same factor that has led to Africa leading the world in cell phone coverage and ownership. Because the internet started here, the US is covered with a patchwork of older systems of delivery, from broadband on down through ISDN and dialup, dating back to when the internet was first becoming a factor. Countries who started wide-scale implementation of internet coverage later, particularly ones where the implementation was public, got to simply skip over antiquated delivery systems such as these and start directly at whatever the state of the art was at the time, be it DSL or whatever.

[Lys]

Placerville is only 40 miles from Sacramento and Lancaster-Palmdale is 40 miles from Santa Clarita, which is in turn 30 miles from downtown LA. Crescent City, on the other hand, is fairly isolated, but its 7200 people don't exactly strike me as sizeable. It's not like Sweden doesn't have similar examples anyway. Kiruna is larger than Crescent City and Placerville combined but located 190 miles from Boden, with damn close to nothing in between. For comparison Crescent City is a little over 80 miles from Grant's Pass and Eureka, which makes it only a bit more isolated than Sweden's Umea, a city of 80 000 people. Similarly Ostersund's 44 000 people are a good 120 miles from Sundsvall.

So while there is no doubt that geography plays a role in California's difficulty in getting good high speed internet, it seems to me that there's more going on than that, but i could not speculate as to what exactly. For another comparison, Washington is also fairly large with a number of sizeable but far-flung population centres - Spokane, Yakima, the Quad Cities - yet it manages far better speeds than California. Still the point i was making is that there is wide variance at the state level, such that the national average is completely useless as a measure. The US may not be in the top ten for internet speeds, but people in Virginia, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts aren't really seeing it, while people in Kentucky and Arkansas are getting far lower quality of service than the national average would indicate.

[General Havoc]

Hence the other suggestions I made regarding possible explanations. And raw distance is not always the best factor to employ. Lancaster is separated from LA by fifty miles of Tehachepie mountains, and Tahoe City or Southshore from Sacramento by a hundred miles of Sierra. Not that Sweden does not also have mountains, of course, but it's not as simple as "run a cable". The costs become prohibitive very quickly when you're dealing with a business with margins as low as broadband cabling.

[Lys]

Sweden has terrain broken up by not just rocky hills and mountains, but also swamps and lake networks. Not to mention that the isolated its isolated cities are up north, where it's really damned cold, which tends to make infrastructure expensive to build and maintain. Again i'm sure terrain is a huge factor in California's issues with internet speeds, it's mountains are bigger if nothing else, but i think your other explanation may be a more important causative factor. So much of the tech industry has roots in the West Coast, particularly California, that it makes sense that it would have a lot of older infrastructure. Historically speaking plenty of entities - corporate and national - have suffered problems in being early adopters of particular technology and infrastructure once more advanced stuff shows up, since making the switch over can be unappealing and difficult when something that works is already in place. There's also the local legislative, regulation, and cultural landscape to consider. If Swedish government has invested heavily into its computer networks but the California government hasn't then that would go a long way toward explaining the difference. It is my understanding that Swedes are generally more willing to tolerate higher taxes and government spending than Americans, so that could very well be it.