U.S. Broadband Still Proceeds at a Relative Snail's Pace

Broadband speed claims by ISPs are one thing, but it is real work results that are most significant. Thus, Royal Pingdom's report on the real-world state of the Internet, in terms of speed, drew our interest.

Royal Pingdom used data from Akamai to come up with its results. The data is from Q2 2010 and represents averages speeds in the country.

Here are some interesting data points:
  • China is No. 1 in terms of number of Internet users, but No. 42 in terms of speed (860kbps)
  • The U.S., creator of the Internet, is No. 2 among Internet users but No. 12 in speed (4.6Mbps)
  • The top 3 in speed are all Asian: South Korea (16.63Mbps), Hong Kong (8.57Mbps), and Japan (8.03Mbps). South Korea has long been the top spot in the world for speed; we'll guess that all that bandwidth is being used for StarCraft 2 right now.
  • Of the top 10 countries, 3 are in Asia, and 7 in Europe.
  • Iran rounds out the top 50 at 410kbps.
Although the U.S. continues to lag quite a few countries in terms of broadband speed, things could certainly be a lot worse. Take a look at the full report.