Need for Speed?
Jun 26, 2007
Communications Workers of America (CWA), a labor union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, has issued a report on Internet speeds in the U.S. that is based on data collected through the organization's Speedmatters.org site between September 2006 and May 2007. According to CWA's report, close to 80,000 people representing all 50 states and D.C. visited the site to take an Internet "speed test" designed to measure how fast their computers upload and download data.
As Technology Daily (sub required) reported in its PM edition yesterday, the state with the fastest Internet speeds turned out to be Rhode Island, but "the connections are still seven times slower than those widely available in some other countries."
CWA's stats found that the median download speed for its speed tests in the U.S. was 1.9 megabits per second. It compares those numbers to median download speed in Japan (61 mbps), South Korea (45 mbps), Finland (21 mbps) and other countries, and concludes that the "U.S. Internet is far behind the rest of the world" and that a national policy to promote broadband is needed.
The entire report is available here, and you can still take your own speed test here. Our own test clocked a download speed of 537 kbps (well below the U.S. average) and an upload speed of 271 kbps (slightly above the U.S. average).
Tags:
