Actual broadband speeds have taken on increasing importance recently – so much so the FCC included it as a part of the national broadband plan process and launched some tools of its own to measure it. They even hired SamKnows to study the broadband speed issue.
BroadbandReports.com turns our attention to another resource for broadband speed data – the Ookla Net Index. Ookla operates Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net sites, and as a result has compiled broadband speed data from more than 1.5 billion tests to date. They claim this data represents the ‘world’s most comprehensive measurement of broadband penetration and performance.’ They are now making this data open to the public, available for research and analysis by industry, government and academia. Their results are quite interesting.
As of today the Global Download Index is 7.68Mbps, and the top countries by download speed are South Korea (36.5Mbps), Latvia (23.3Mbps), Republic of Moldova (21.5Mbps), Japan (20.3Mbps) and Sweden (19.8Mbps). In the U.S., the top performing states are Delaware (15.6Mbps), Rhode Island (15.2Mbps), Massachusetts (15Mbps), New Jersey (14.1Mbps) and Virginia (13.6Mbps); the state with the lowest performance, according to Net Index, is Alaska at 2.8Mbps average download speed.
The United States comes in 29th worldwide, with a speed index of 10.16 Mb/s, losing out to powerhouses like Andora (17.06 Mb/s), the Aland Islands (15.34 Mb/s), and Slovakia (10.58 Mb/s). City rankings within each of the 50 states are available to review. It’s a pretty cool tool!
