Now You Can See How Our Internet Compares to Everyone Else’s

Don't hitch your cart to this horse, we'll just say that

April 7, 2017 9:00 am

According to a study of world-wide internet speeds, America could stand to put in a bit of work improving our position.

People: We’re not even in the top 10

The survey was conducted by Akamai, a leading content delivery provider. (There’s a decent chance that if you’re reading a webpage, they had something to do with making that happen.) The survey covers average internet speeds in 2015 — maybe we’ve gotten way faster in the past two years?? Final caveat: A few countries with either very few ISPs or just one — for example, Vatican City and the Norwegian islands of Svalbard and Jan Mayen — had such fast connections but such poor sample sizes that they’ve been disqualified from the final rankings — Akamai limited those results to countries with at least 25,000 ISPs. 

The victors: South Korea. Next: Ireland, Hong Kong, Sweden, The Netherlands, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, Latvia and Finland. 

Us? We’re 20th. It could be worse — China is 111th. The average speed is 5Mbits/s; we clock in with 11.9. South Korea has better than twice that: 23.6. 

Akamai also calculated average peak connection speed, more fully defined as “an average of only the highest connection speed calculated from each unique IP address.” Guess what? We still did poorly. Singapore (98.5Mbits/s) and Hong Kong (92.6Mbits/s) won that contest; we have around half that, with 53.3Mbits/s for 22nd place. Which medal is that? 

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