Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » USA Broadband is Slow. Really Slow.

August 14, 2008

USA Broadband is Slow. Really Slow.

Surprise, surprise: U.S. broadband is slow. Really slow.

The U.S. comes in 15th on a worldwide scale, far behind the leaders Japan, South Korea and Finland.
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A file that takes four minutes to download in South Korea would take nearly an hour and a half to download in the U.S. using the average bandwidth. Japanese users leaves U.S. users behind with an eye-popping 63.60 Mb/s download link. This means that Japanese can download an entire movie in just two minutes, as opposed to two hours or more here in the U.S. Just in case you are wondering: No, Japanese users do not pay more for their broadband connections. In fact, U.S. broadband cost is among the highest in the world.

Japan dominates international broadband speed with a median download speed of approximately 63 Mb/s, more than enough to stream DVD-quality video with surround audio in real time. Next on the list is South Korea where download speeds achieve an average of 49.50 Mb/s. Finland and France follow with 21.70 Mb/s and 17.60 Mb/s, respectively. Canada ranked eighth with an average download speed of 7.60 Mb/s. The U.S. came in 15th with 2.35 Mb/s.

I see this as an economic issue. Countries that have provided an investment in internet infrastructure to provide broadband to the home at reasonable prices will be rewarded.

by curiouscat Tags: Economics, Students, Technology
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4 Responses to “USA Broadband is Slow. Really Slow.”

Paul Says:
August 16th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
The only problem is that America is so much bigger than a lot of these countries (except Canada), so the costs to create a major broadband infrastructure is through the roof.

That said, the Internet has massive potential and it should definitely be heavily subsidized.
Titah Laksamana Says:
August 17th, 2008 at 10:23 am
that’s right america is big and you can compare it with china.. if china broadband is faster than US, that would be a problem^^
CuriousCat: Lake Superior vs. Silicon Valley Hot Spots Says:
August 18th, 2008 at 10:11 am
This is one small example of why Silicon Valley is so successful. To be economically successful, countries need to focus on big things (investing in infrastructure, sensible laws relating to innovation…
Anonymous Says:
September 29th, 2008 at 6:12 am
@Paul: America is also much richer than most of these countries, and as CuriousCat said countries that invest in infrastructure will (most likely) be rewarded with economic success.