A new report from Cable.co.uk shows a wide diversity between the fastest and slowest U.S. broadband states and cities.
The fastest municipal speed in the country is in Washington, VA, with a download speed of 210.19Mbps, while the slowest is in North Slope Bo, AK, with a download speed of only 0.28Mbps. The speeds vary widely from municipality to municipality, even for municipalities in the same state.
Slowest U.S. Broadband States
On a statewide basis, Rhode Island ranks at the top with an average speed of 36.69Mbps, while Montana was last. with an average speed of only 10.94Mbps, according to the report. So downloading an HD movie in Rhode Island, on average, would take 27 minutes and 54 seconds, less than one-third of the time of in Montana, where it would take 1 hour and 33 minutes.
The research found major regional differences as well. Eight of the top 10 states in terms of download speeds are on the east coast, with Oregon and Washington the exceptions. Western states California and Nevada also have high average download speeds, the report said. Fast download speeds were also found in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. There was a large difference in speeds across the Rust Belt states.
“Urban areas, particularly on the coasts, have exceptional access compared to the Midwest and rural areas, reflecting social, geographic and economic divides,” said Collin Anderson, an independent researcher at M-Lab, which collected 42 million speed tests in 12 months prior to May 10. M-Labs is a partnership between New America’s Open Technology Institute, Google Open Source Research, Princeton University’s PlanetLab and other supporting partners. The Cable.co.uk report analyzed the data.
In a previous Cable.co.uk report, US download speeds were faster than those of 168 countries but lagged behind the world’s top 20.
