US broadband is getting faster but still lags behind Asia
It's been a good year for the internet in America. Not only did it receive much needed federal Net Neutrality protections, the average download speed increased by a solid 10 Mbps nationwide over the previous year. As of March 2015, the average download speed in the US is 33.9Mbps -- thanks, in part, to increased infrastructure investments by ISPs. That figure puts the US ahead of a number of European nations including the UK (30.18Mbps), Germany (29.95Mbps), Spain (28.28Mbps) and Ireland (27.29Mbps). But don't start chanting "SCOREBOARD!" just yet. Those speeds are only enough to move the US up to 27th out of 199 connected countries worldwide and roughly half of what South Korea (84.31Mbps) and Japan (60.49Mbps) enjoy.
These figures come from Ookla's Speedtest March 2015 survey. In April of last year, America's national average hovered at 23.9 Mbps; barely better than the global average of 22.9Mbps. And it's not as though every state of the union enjoyed these speeds. While Washington, Missouri, New York, California and Utah offered the highest average download speeds (ranging from approximately 40 to 45Mbps), states like Maine, Kentucky and Idaho could only muster between 17.7 and 20.9Mbps.
What's more, these speed tests included Google Fiber (230.69Mbps) despite the fact that it's only available in eight cities nationwide. And given that the next three fastest ISPs -- Verizon FIOS (42.27Mbps), Cox (39.42Mbps) and Comcast (38.70Mbps) -- are all five times slower than Google, Fiber's inclusion does appear to skew the results to some degree. No wonder Kansas City, MO topped the nation with an average DL speed of 68.59Mbps. You can find the complete test results and further analysis at NetIndex.com.
