The Federal Communications Commission reports “striking across-the-board-improvements” in U.S. broadband access services in its July 2012 “Measuring Broadband America Report.”
The study focuses on three primary improvements in residential broadband service over the last year, beginning with accurate delivery of advertised performance. Five ISPs now routinely deliver nearly one hundred percent or greater of the speed advertised to the consumer even during time periods when bandwidth demand is at its peak, the report says.
In the August 2011 Report, only two ISPs met this level of performance. In 2011, the average ISP delivered 87 percent of advertised download speed during peak usage periods; in 2012, that jumped to 96 percent, the report says. .
Performance also is more uniform, across providers. The 2011 study showed wide variances between top performers and bottom performers in meeting advertised speeds.
On average, customers subscribed to faster speed tiers in 2012 than in 2011. This is a result of both upgrades by ISPs to their network as well as some migration of consumers to higher speed services.
During the testing period for the August 2011 Report, the average speed tier was 11.1 Megabits per second. In the lastest report, speed increased to 14.3 Mbps, an almost 30 percent increase in just one year.
The actual increase in experienced speed by consumers was even greater than the increase in advertised speed. End user experienced speeds rose from 10.6 Mbps to 14.6 Mbps, an improvement of about 38 percent over the one year period.
The report expresses optimism that the U.S. market is moving toward the goal of equipping at least 100 million homes with actual download speeds of at least 50 Mbps by 2015, and 100 Mbps by 2020.
