The Communications Workers of America released a study yesterday that shows the U.S. lagging behind other industrialized nations in the availability and use of high-speed Internet connections. The research, based on speed tests conducted from nearly 80,000 broadband users who visited a CWA site called speedmatters.org, found that the median download speed in the U.S. is 1.9 Mbps, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in Korea, 21 Mbps in Finland, 18 Mbps in Sweden and 7.6 Mbps in Canada.
Those stats, moreover, really don’t take into account the 30% to 40% of U.S. residents who access the Internet via dial-up because most dial-up users didn’t bother to go to speedmatters.org for the test. So, the sorry fact is that the 1.9 Mbps download speed is, if anything, an overestimate.
The telecom labor union produced an interesting report (PDF here) that breaks down speeds by state. The state with the fastest broadband connectivity based on the tests? Rhode Island, with a median of 5 Mbps downstream (and a remarkable 1.7 Mbps upstream.) The state with the slowest speeds? Alaska, with a measly median of 545 kbps and 206 kbps upstream.
Of course the CWA has some policy prescriptions for solving this underachievement, the most interesting of which is to establish a goal of achieving at least 10 Mbps download (1 Mbps upload) in the U.S. by 2010, one of the more modest and attainable speed targets put forth in DC. The other recommendations: collect better data on broadband speeds, maintain an open Internet, reform universal service, establish public-private partnerships and safeguard consumers and workers.
And, of course, the CWA has a dog in this hunt — to achieve higher speeds, broadband network providers have to, more or less, upgrade plant and equipment, which means more jobs for the union’s employees. But still, there’s no denying that broadband speeds in the U.S. stink.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:23 AM|Comments(0)
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