21 ms·

US internet speeds 91% faster in 2020 according to user speed tests

208 points by mootothemax 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago
Lots of people home watching TV over an internet stream. So, incentive to fix things.
wmichelin 6y ago
For those too lazy to read the article, it's 91% faster in 2020 as compared to 2019.
- knightofmars 6y ago
  tl;dr?
  - lainga 6y ago
    year add: speed twice
throwaway1777 6y ago
How much of this is people paying for faster connections to work from home vs actual infrastructure build out?
- anonymfus 6y ago
  Can it also be people cancelling slow mobile plans?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- loeg 6y ago
  Or selection bias — people only speed-testing their new fast internet plan?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  No idea. As with all truth, you should check with multiple sources for corroboration first. I know in Hawaii at least there was a massive DCCA (chamber of commerce) initiative started way back in 2012 to outfit all public schools with gigabit fiber and all universities with 10gigabit fiber. Hospitals also got fiber connections though I don't know how fast, and there were a few 10gigabit undersea cables laid between the islands themselves. The state government started offering incentives and subsidies to encourage more cable landings on Oahu. This was also the same program in which they began installing the FirstNet system and the 5G infrastructure. No idea what's going on on the mainland. https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadband_Strategic_Plan_Dec_2012.pdf https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadb...
- satisfaction 6y ago
  This seems more likely than Charter, ATT, et al. investing massive amounts of cash into their networks. I think there would be massive PR campaign if the actually almost doubled available bandwidth in a year. The capacity was always there, they just needed to be paid in order to open it up. I upgraded from 200/10 to 600/35, they just flipped a switch.
  - dasudasu 6y ago
    Yep. Service providers didn't ramp up their investments at all into telecom equipment providers during covid, which is impressive. They just had good capacity that was never fully used. They're going slowly on the whole 5G thing now as they don't expect customers to be ready for massive price hikes to their plans. Ultimately the capacity of customers (individuals and businesses) to pay is what drive those investments, regardless of how much everyone claim to need ever increasing bandwidths.
    - satisfaction 6y ago
      After posting that I went back through my invoices and it does appear that at some-point Chart upgraded me from 100/10 to 200/10 at no extra charge.
  - WillPostForFood 6y ago
    It is both. This number is probably driven by people that are upgrading plans. But the telcom companies are spending billions on expanding infrastructure. Look at the capex numbers for any of the big companies. A lot of it is 5G, but wired as well. https://www.telecomlead.com/5g/att-enhances-capex-to-5-bn-in-q1-targeting-5g-network-expansion-94848 https://www.telecomlead.com/5g/att-enhances-capex-to-5-bn-in...
- eru 6y ago
  Well, if there's demand, supply often follows.
- nhumrich 6y ago
  Correlary, how much of this is people _running speed tests from home_ because zoom is slow, etc, where otherwise they wouldn't.
- disown 6y ago
  Also Zoom classrooms for kids/students. Work and school from home is probably the catalyst for higher inter speeds as employees/parents need faster internet speeds for Zoom. It would also correlate with the rise of Zoom stock price.
thatwasunusual 6y ago
Given it was shit in 2019... so...?
Retric 6y ago
Averaging can give some really unrealistic numbers especially when people are upgrading their home internet to work from home. Upgrading a single connection from 100Mbps to 1Ggbit is hardly the same as upgrading 100 connections from 1Mbps to 10Mbps.
- mrlala 6y ago
  Completely agree. It would be much more interesting to compare the data in a bin fashion from 2019 -> 2020 like this 0.1 - 1 1-10 10-20 20-50 50+ And then see how ridiculous quote just the average is in this case..
  - redisman 6y ago
    I wish there was some attention paid to upload speeds too. A 100Mbps connection often only has 1-5Mbps upload which seriously handicaps it for work and hobbyists.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Hence I consider anything that’s not symmetric fiber to not be worthy of mentioning, because I know you’re getting on upload (and probably latency and packet loss too).
  - nightcracker 6y ago
    In other words, the interesting comparison is two log histograms (or overlaid).
    - mrlala 6y ago
      Sure although I would say you can't just throw it into log bins automatically.. some data you need to massage it to what makes the most sense.
    - eru 6y ago
      In general, no need for histograms, if you learn to love cumulative distribution functions (or CDF for short). See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_functi...
lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
I get 300 Mbps down from Xfinity, fine by me. But the paltry 5-6 Mbps I get up with it is BS. Sure, I don’t need 300 up, but for what I’m paying it would be nice to get at least 50.
- snazz 6y ago
  15 or 20 mbps up is about the theoretical maximum on cable because of how the spectrum is allocated by cable companies. Cable TVs didn't need much upload compared to download.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    No, that’s just cable companies allocating significantly more to download spectrum than upload. There isn’t anything fundamental in docsis preventing you from giving more spectrum to upload to have way less contention on the upload slots.
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    While no DOCSIS revision has symmetric theoretical caps, DOCSIS 3.1 which is currently in use is capable of up to 2Gbps upstream, while the upcoming (for the most part) DOCSIS 4.0 standard is capable of up to 6Gbps upstream, and was developed largely to response to increasing demands for upstream bandwidth. While these are obviously best-case speeds, gigabit symmetric is quite achievable with DOCSIS3.1 and available in some markets. However, it is unfortunately true that many cable carriers are constrained in their channel planning by legacy devices with fixed channel requirements. For example, Comcast has at least historically struggled with planning DOCSIS channels around legacy Motorola STBs that require their on-screen guide information on a specific channel. Essentially, in order for Comcast to switch to full DOCSIS3.1 upstream channel allocations they will need to first get every customer with a legacy STB to swap it out for a new one. This is a formidable task and not one they have so far completed, so in my area upstream remains limited to 35Mbps even with 1Gbps downstream.
  - lorenzhs 6y ago
    Nah, there are cable companies that offer 50 mbps upstream, and the DOCSIS 3.1 standard that's currently in use supports much more. They're just stingy.
nostromo 6y ago
> there is cause for celebration in Dallas, Seattle and Austin, after our analysis has shown that these cities are performing extremely well relative to most European capital cities. Seattle has some actual competition now, and many (most?) of us can get fiber gigabit to the home for a reasonable rate. It's glorious. I hope other American cities start courting meaningful ISP competition in their cities -- but I'm not holding my breath. Many American city governments see ISPs as companies they can shake down for fees and concessions, not realizing they're only hurting their own citizens by limiting choice and increasing costs.
- redisman 6y ago
  I need to see whats out there. Still using Xfinity in the suburbs and it's pretty meh, terrible upload making wfh a pain.
- archgoon 6y ago
  Can you expand on when competition came to Seattle and how? I've been using Condo Internet (now Wave Broadband) for something close to 5-6 years. When was the tipping point in terms of competition?
  - nostromo 6y ago
    Centurylink now offers fiber gigabit to the home for about $65 or so a month. It happened because a former mayor (Ed Murray, who has since left office after a personal scandal) made it easier for ISPs to build out their networks and removed homeowners and neighborhood groups from the process which previously allowed them to block things like communications boxes on sidewalks. At the time, a bunch of local columnists moaned about this "corporate giveaway"[1] -- but it's pretty clear in retrospect it was the right move. 1. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-giveaway-sure-to-create-controversy/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-giv...
    - filoleg 6y ago
      Don't forget about Google Webpass, they started advertising heavily in Seattle area starting about a year ago. I switched to them earlier last year due to having periodic issues with WaveG in my new apt building about 8 months into my lease (their technician would come a week or two after I report constant outages, fix something in the server room of my building, and then the issues would start again in a few weeks; haven't had any issues with WaveG at my previous apt though). Service has been great, pricing is even cheaper than WaveG (I pay about $50/mo for their gig fiber offering), no contracts or any other lock-in (unless you pick the option to pay for the whole year upfront for a small discount). It definitely does feel like there is a good amount of real competition in Seattle now.
vmception 6y ago
Has anyone seen how fast Tor has gotten? Its impressive that so many nodes are better and have more bandwidth now
- goatsi 6y ago
  The incentives for running an exit node keep getting better: https://medium.com/@nusenu/how-malicious-tor-relays-are-exploiting-users-in-2020-part-i-1097575c0cac https://medium.com/@nusenu/how-malicious-tor-relays-are-expl...
  - vmception 6y ago
    Seems like you should never hit an exit node then, as a best practice. Just use Onion services, and RDP into another computer and browse the clearnet internet with that.
paxys 6y ago
The title makes it seem like broadband infrastructure in the country significantly improved over the last year, but I'm guessing people just paid more for faster speeds at home.
- RyanShook 6y ago
  This was my question. Seems highly unlikely that infrastructure improved 91% in a year.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I don't see how paying more raises speed without improving infrastructure?
  - jayshua 6y ago
    The extra capacity was already there - speeds were artificially (right word?) suppressed because customers were on a cheaper plan.
paxys 6y ago
What is up with Stockholm? https://fairinternetreport.com/assets/img/research/us-vs-europe/us-vs-eu-cities.png https://fairinternetreport.com/assets/img/research/us-vs-eur...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bagels 6y ago
  Bad data science. Why are they fitting what appears to be high order polynomial curves to these data?
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  There's absolutely no way that can reflect reality. I don't even think it's possible for people to downgrade their speeds that much even if they wanted to. Anecdotal, but I just checked and the slowest speed I can get for my Stockholm apartment is 250/250, and the slowest speed my dad can get for his apartment is 100/100. This has got to be some data anomaly. If they're basing their numbers off of tests that people voluntarily do, then maybe in 2019 a lot of people tested their mobile internet, while no-one bothered testing their home internet because it's fast enough?
- Tor3 6y ago
  I've been looking at that graph several times and I have no idea how they got those numbers for those European cities.. it's like it's from years ago. The numbers are way too low.
deleted 6y ago
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wishinghand 6y ago
While it's great that the average speed is in the mid-30s, it's still just the average. If it was closer to 100 I'd feel more elated by the news, since that means the lower ends would be acceptable no matter where in the USA a user is. Also notable is that a lot of countries in the chart they showed had a 50% or more increase over 2019.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  Good point. I imagine the average is going up because the already fast speeds in cities are just getting faster with fiber and faster cable connections.
olyjohn 6y ago
Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster. For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data, what good does the speed do? The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet. Rural communities stuck with 1.5MBps DSL or even slower can't even have 2 kids in school learning virtually. Imagine if you had 1 remote parent working from home, and 2 kids trying to do school. Most rural internet just won't cut it. I feel terrible for people having to deal with our shit connectivity in this country.
- munk-a 6y ago
  > The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet. Infrastructure isn't free and while it's hilariously embarrassing to have slow speeds in "rural cities" (i.e. actual cities that just don't happen to be on the coast) simply due to capitalism doing it's worst - living in the middle of no where is an expense on society. It falls into the same camp as people who live in hurricane areas - the government bailing you out once so you can move is a fine idea (and the government needs to be providing sufficient funds for these people to actually relocate) but living in remote areas and living coastally in the south east come with lots of benefits to you... and costs for everyone else. I am A-OK with folks who insist on living in the middle of nowhere paying for it. Oh I'm going to add a big old caveat for people who were forcefully relocated - if you're living on Rosebud Indian Reservation then relocation really isn't an option.
  - SteveGerencser 6y ago
    You do realize that roughly 100% of your food comes from those rural areas that you so casually throw away as an expense on society? Add to that, telecom companies have been collecting additional "fees" from every user for decades that was supposed to go for expanding infrastructure and never has been.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  4K movie seeking on consumer devices can be dramatically faster when you increase from 50mbit/s to 400mbit/s, even though you'll still download just as much movie as you would on either speed. We're talking the difference between 5-10 seconds of buffering and beginning playback immediately. Video game updates also accelerate dramatically, allowing more efficient use of free time. Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year, even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882 Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering internet to that area. Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has stable latency in that scenario.
astrophysician 6y ago
For the uninitiated: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/
- kstrauser 6y ago
  I wonder how long that'll keep up? I already have gigabit fiber, and by that graph he will too. But then what? Faster is better, but 10Gb wouldn't be much of an improvement in practice over what I have today. Game update servers don't saturate my bandwidth, and we can have multiple people streaming 4K video at once without blinking an eye. What would be the next thing pushing faster speeds?
  - deadmutex 6y ago
    Downstream speed is only one part of the equation. I think if we look at upload speeds, and latency, there's still a lot of room to improve for a large section of the population. I would love to have the ability to do wireless cloud VR gaming in my home.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    High(er) resolution video, VR feeds, games (last COD was 250GB) plus all the unknown future applications
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      4K streams only need 20Mb. Assume 8K is 4x at worst.
      - deadmutex 6y ago
        How much do you think this display would need? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw, also assuming HDR and 60fps+
  - deadmutex 6y ago
deadmutex 6y ago
I wish more attention was paid to upload speed and latency to the rest of the internet too. People are backing up more personal videos than ever (including cloud connected security cameras, etc.). Latency is also very important to lower actual transfer times (since it will allow TCP to take full advantage of the bandwidth available). Latency also will be helpful for new experiences like Stadia and Geforce Now.
- Tor3 6y ago
  The latency is not a problem as long as you avoid packet losses. If you have losses then you pay dearly if there's latency. The latency itself doesn't present a problem, the TCP window size increases and takes care of that. The problem is packet losses, because (even with 'intelligent' retransmission) there's a lot of (the buffered) window to retransmit and then the performance dies. When the packet losses stay low, say, 0.001%, the latency is not an issue. (At work I did months of testing on TCP performance for a 900ms rtt high-speed link) But yes, upload speed is more important than ever. For my work-from-home setup I need to transfer lots of data both ways. And for my "cloud" backup etc. I need to push large amounts of data out of the house. And with fiber I get that, fortunately.
war1025 6y ago
What I've concluded from measuring things on my home network is that my cheapo old router is actually only giving maybe a third of the download speed my ISP is providing me. I'd guess that is the case for a non-trivial subset of the population. And I mean I get ~15Mbps to my laptop when my connection gives me 50Mpbs, nowhere near something like gigabit which I'd guess is just an excuse for ISPs to fleece money out of people in all but a small minority of cases where people buy it. But also I have zero incentive to upgrade my router because the internet is "fast enough" for everything I need, even with only using a small fraction of the available bandwidth. Edit: Also to the headline of the article, my ISP doubled the base internet rate from 25Mpbs to 50Mpbs this year. So I guess the report lines up with my reality quite well.
- hnuser123456 6y ago
  Wow, I can't imagine being in your shoes at all. I would immediately go to the store and get a cheap semi-modern router for $50 to get my full ISP speeds, especially when missing 2/3 of it. Even a 10 year old 802.11n AP ought to be able to get you 50mbps at reasonable range.
  - war1025 6y ago
    I probably should get a new router. It's sort of become low priority. The main signal issue is that our router is in the garage next to where our internet comes in. For a few weeks in the spring I was looking at setting up a wired network since all the phone jacks in our house are actually Cat5e cable that could be upgraded to ethernet jacks pretty easily. But then I also lost ambition for that idea. I did spend $20 a couple months ago to get a latest-generation wifi chip for my laptop, which I'd recommend to anyone since it's a trivial thing to upgrade and I never even realized the wifi chips were swapable. That improved my network speed by a factor of two I think.
    - war1025 6y ago
      For the record in case anyone goes back this far in the comments, this exchange did finally push me over the edge and I ordered a new router.
jcrawfordor 6y ago
I wonder how much of this is an artifact of people increasing their bandwidth subscriptions vs. the investment of various DOCSIS operators in Node+1 architecture, which at least in this area rapidly accelerated over the last year - I don't think that has anything to do with COVID per se but just the incumbent ISP really getting to the main stages of that project right now.
GNOMES 6y ago
I hate that across the highway near by (Houston) is ATT Fiber with 1G up and 1G down for around a 100$/month. I moved across the highway, and now stuck with Xfinity coaxial 1GB down and around 50MB up if I am lucky for 150$/month including no data cap fee. I don't understand why a company like Xfinity with such negative public image wouldn't try to give everyone a speed bump to improve their image.
- devonkim 6y ago
  When one has eliminated competition in its operating markets, public perception doesn’t matter anymore.
cm2187 6y ago
I am surprised France is so low. They are rolling out fibre to the premise with gigabit connections in every big city and even in many smaller cities and villages.
- Bayart 6y ago
  It's probably down to the dataset. I went looking for their source and it's not anything I've ever heard about. Most Europeans would probably be more familiar with Speedtest.net [1], which seems like a closer match to reality (with France having descent broadband coverage and trash mobile). [1] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
fxtentacle 6y ago
Those diagrams seem completely unreliable to me. I know multiple founders who have 1gbit/s fiber lines to their homes in Berlin. Plus all 3 major providers (1&1, Telekom, O2) offer up to 250mbit/s there. Also, you expect me to believe that the internet speeds in France and Germany magically went down from 2017 to 2018 and 2019? BTW, my guess would be that most people stay at around 30mbit because it's good enough for 4K YouTube streaming and still affordable.
unnouinceput 6y ago
Quote: "1 Denmark; 2 Switzerland; 3 Sweden; 4 Netherlands; 5 Finland; 6 Belgium; 7 Norway; 8 Germany; 9 UK; 10 Poland; 11 Spain; 12 Ireland; 13 France; 14 Austria; 15 Italy" Riight! Cause Europe is only those countries. Conveniently forget about your king when comes to Europe in terms of internet speed?
- cambalache 6y ago
  Spain "barely" makes it into Europe for most Americans. There is 0 chance for small central and eastern European countries.
lightlyused 6y ago
Recently my upload speed dropped from 50mbps to 10mbps. Trying to get the ISP to address the issue is like taking to a brick wall. The tech they sent out couldn't find anything wrong, but hinted that it was configured that way and there was nothing I could do to get it changed since the ISP wouldn't guarantee the upstream speed. We really need a functioning FCC to get this now critical infrastructure fixed.
hnracer 6y ago
I guess they mean bandwidth and not speed per se
musicale 6y ago
Let me know once internet service in the US compares favorably in cost and speed to internet service in South Korea.
- johnfn 6y ago
  Let me know when the US has comparable square mileage and population density to South Korea :P
  - travisporter 6y ago
    Hey letting you both know that Sweden has the same population density as the US with better broadband.
    - wahern 6y ago
      The U.S. actually has similar weighted population density to most of Europe. Simply dividing the total population by total area is a very poor metric, especially for a country like the U.S. which just has an enormous amount of unpopulated land area. An example of a weighted population density metric is the local density of the median household. Unfortunately, weighted metrics are rather new and last I looked I couldn't find population numbers using the same metric. The U.S. Census Bureau uses a metric based on census tract as the local area; EU uses square kilometer. For that and other reasons the published data isn't directly comparable (at least not easily). But to a first approximation the U.S. and Europe seem very similar--the U.S. is far more dense than commonly believed, and Europe less dense than commonly believed. Of course, even with a better metric I presume South Korea is in another league entirely.
    - dudul 6y ago
      And how much of Sweden's population is concentrated in the southern quarter of the country? 80%? Dumb average density doesn't reflect the reality of population's distribution.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
gnicholas 6y ago
I wonder if their method of excluding cellular connections treated tethered computers as cellular. When I saw the headline my first thought was that speed tests run over LTE could account for some of the difference (but not reflect people's primary internet connections). > Speed test data for cellular connections was excluded from our analysis by using MaxMind's Connection Type database
twsted 6y ago
The problem in Italy is that many parts of the territory have abysmal service. In Milan most people have 1G / 1G unlimited for ~40€ / month, which is not bad.
dkdk8283 6y ago
Let’s call this a speed:cost competition then rank. I pay a shitload for asymmetric download. I piss faster than upload.
0xy 6y ago
Net neutrality is abolished, and internet speeds get substantially faster. In total, since abolition, internet speeds are up more than double. I find that very interesting, given the amount of NN proponents (including academics) claiming internet speed would grind to a halt.
- th0ma5 6y ago
  Considering speeds are still pretty awful, I'm not sure it is something to really celebrate... it is maybe a good start, but it is pretty late.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    According to Speedtest the average US speed is 165 down 62 up, or to put it another way it's enough for the average household to stream SIX simultaneous 4K-quality streams while also uploading photos and video chatting with friends. How is that "pretty awful"?
    - th0ma5 6y ago
      What's the spread tho?
      - th0ma5 6y ago
        So I mean I went here https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index ... and it is basically average broadband speed... I mean... that excludes pretty much everyone without access to broadband. And doesn't say anything about caps, which, let's face it, reduces your monthly throughput to an instantaneous average well well below average, and approaching dialup speeds. All of these issues... access, caps, average vs. median vs. minimum vs. maximum speeds... are all things that would be handled by regulation.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
5G to home and Starlink are the barbarians at the gates of the Comcast Empire.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  ... not really. US cellular services have absolutely miserable data caps compared to wired ISPs (yes, even on "unlimited" plans). The increased speeds of 5G are basically irrelevant if you get throttled after downloading 50 GB in a month. This is a problem that cell providers could solve pretty easily -- but they've had that option for years, and it seems like they'd rather not. Starlink is density-limited. There's a finite amount of satellite capacity available to any amount of ground, and they can't target upgrades to specific geographic regions. They're a great upgrade from existing satellite Internet services, but they aren't going to replace terrestrial services for most people who have that option.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Commodity 5G can solve last mile to fiber stations. It doesn't have to be telcos. Starlink will eat into exurbs, outer suburbs, and disgruntled customers. Both will be viable competition at the 200 mbit level, and will drive down Comcast costs.
austincheney 6y ago
Some ISPs offer 10gbps packages to the house. I have no idea how to take full use of 1gbps pipe.
williamsharris 6y ago
Yeh, internet speed is getting faster all the time.
tehjoker 6y ago
Would have liked to see Asian countries in the comparison.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I fully believe Austin can thank Google Fiber for its speed increase. Not necessarily because that many people actually have Google Fiber - it's rollout has been patchy, delayed, and with Fiber rollouts in other cities halted, I'm not holding my breath to get Fiber in my neighborhood. But Fiber definitely spurned the absolutely shitty incumbents (Time Warner/Spectrum and AT&T) to up their game. Funny how competition works like that. Good article on the topic: https://www.statesman.com/business/20200103/high-speed-high-impact-how-google-fiberrsquos-arrival-changed-things-in-austin https://www.statesman.com/business/20200103/high-speed-high-...
lokimedes 6y ago
Just to bring some data to the conversation, the price for 1Gps symmetric fiber is $78/mo here in the rural parts of Denmark. That also includes a bunch of other incentives such as streaming services, mesh WiFi hardware that is kept up to date as new technologies arrive. https://www.waoo.dk/fibernet/ https://www.waoo.dk/fibernet/ We had a large push from the power companies back in the early 2000’s bringing fiber to homes that was outside the metropolitan areas. This has kept competition going across the country between cable, xDSL, 4-5G and fiber.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  Seems higher than average to me. US$45 is what I pay for 1/1Gbps in Denmark. You could likely switch and get better service on the same network for less. For English readers this is in English instead of Danish: https://kviknet.dk/en/ https://kviknet.dk/en/
aunty_helen 6y ago
Something interesting I recently found out is that New Zealand has just started offering 4gb/4gb connections. There's always a lot of discussion around cable companies and monopolies etc whenever internet is brought up so I'll explain how NZ has done so well, In the 2010s the govt decided they we're going to 'fibre to the home' most of the country. They did so by public private partnerships allocated by regions. Most of the regions went to one company but that hasn't been too much of a problem. The 2nd largest city went to a competitor etc. These companies now own part of the fibre network but don't necessarily sell to consumers. ISP's buy time off the fibre due to something that was done in the early 2000s with the advent of DSL called "Unbundling the local loop". This means anyone can setup an ISP and sell to you using the "governments" fibre. This has resulted in plenty of competition and meant that NZ has gone from lagging behind many countries to now far exceeding. Datacaps were the bane of many 2000s internet consumers 25gb for $x with 256kbs download etc. when USA connections were unlimited 256kbs for half the cost. Another interesting thing that's happened with the rollout of fibre across the land, business connections are now very similar in price to consumer connections. You can also now get business connections to your home and without any additional infrastructure. Just a few years ago a business connection might cost you 2000NZD a month and require an expensive install. Now that the only difference is a SLA, you're looking around 150NZD in comparison to a 100NZD "home" connection. Something I think NZ has done well and could be a good model for other countries.
- stevenjohns 6y ago
  There needs to be a bipartisan political will for it which is hard to capture. Australia tried to follow the same model only for a more conservative government to get in, claim that it was too expensive, butcher the plans (fibre to the node instead of to the premise) to "save costs" the country was left with a more expensive half-baked product that still incorporated a lot of copper. What's worse is that because there was a "government fibre" model it meant that private industry that wanted to lay its own fibre started facing various endless legal issues[0], which, funny enough, is entirely supported by the originally less conservative political groups that pushed for the rollout in the first place. So now we're left with a bad network and legal structures in place to stop it from being privately superseded. [0] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/tpg-calls-for-nbn-protectionism-to-end-554297 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/tpg-calls-for-nbn-protectioni...
bashwizard 6y ago
It's amazing how far behind the US have been. I remember getting 100/100 Mbit fiber included in my rent 15 years ago here in Sweden.
codezero 6y ago
For a big chunk of the stay-at-home order, didn’t a bunch of providers remove caps/limits? Seems like that alone would cause a huge increase in home speeds.
- BatteryMountain 6y ago
  In South Africa most fibre providers doubled the speed, aka 50/50 became 100/100 for 3 months without increasing the price. It has since been reverted.
MarkSweep 6y ago
I recently switched from Comcast to AT&T Fiber, and yes, my speeds are up according to speed tests. But on certain routes I only get 30Kbps (sometimes to Azure!). Wikipedia and Twitter only loads half the time. Sites that don't use TLS sometimes load a gibberish. So yes, the speed is faster, but I kinda want to switch back to Comcast. And don't get me started about the idiotic, mandatory $10/month shitty router they require you to use.
underlines 6y ago
I should move back to Switzerland. Shortly before I left in 2016, we had a small ISP, init7 providing symmetrical 1Gbps connections for 70 USD. In 2020 they get 10Gbit for 50 USD... Meanwhile I pay 60USD for a 50Mbps asymmetrical connection in Bangkok.
anonytrary 6y ago
I feel personally attacked. My average before was 60mbps and now it's 115. Not to mention CMCSA stock is up 40%...
Totoradio 6y ago
Weird to see Paris just under 20Mbps, the whole city is covered with fiber
Dahoon 6y ago
1) 30mbps isn't broadband in 2020. Maybe in 2000. 2) Those numbers for EU are incorrect. Look at Stockholm for one. It is at a minimum 2x too low. Even Denmark which is in top is too low. I live in Denmark and even if I pick cable the lowest I can even order is 300Mbit/s. But that would just be stupidity since I can just click on Fiber and get 1/1Gbit/s for US$45.
unishark 6y ago
> American internet users have had a very good 2020: according to research performed by FairInternetReport, median US internet speeds in 2020 doubled to 33.16mbps, up from 17.34mbps in 2019. Covering the five years of 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the largest speed increase seen in the US, with speeds staying essentially the same in 2016 and 2017 (8.91mbps and 9.08mbps respectively), and 2018 recording a median speed of 12.83mbps. It just seems faster when measured in millibits per second.
hedora 6y ago
No mention of upload speeds or data caps. On those fronts, my internet has gotten slower in recent years (and I’m paying more). Thanks Comcast.
hedora 6y ago
It’s interesting that larger countries have lower median speeds. It suggests that ISP’s should not be allowed to serve more than about a million people. I wonder what other industries have inverse scaling properties like this.
disown 6y ago
The power of WFM and Zoom classrooms. If there is one thing people will pay extra for, it's their employment and especially their kids' schooling. When a school tells a parent that they need high speed internet for their kids's Zoom classroom, they'll pay for it. Anyone older people with kids know if schools subsidized parents for high internet connections?
partingshots 6y ago
Gigabit level speed for commercial users wasn’t even imaginable until Google came along, and all of sudden, everybody and their mother seemed to be offering it as if it had somehow always been a part of their rollout plans. A little bit annoying to say the least.
stunt 6y ago
I've switched to 1Gbps from 50Mbps this year since I work from home now. I assume there are many more like me everywhere.

208 points by mootothemax 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago

Lots of people home watching TV over an internet stream. So, incentive to fix things.

wmichelin 6y ago

For those too lazy to read the article, it's 91% faster in 2020 as compared to 2019.

knightofmars 6y ago
tl;dr?
- lainga 6y ago
  year add: speed twice

throwaway1777 6y ago

How much of this is people paying for faster connections to work from home vs actual infrastructure build out?

anonymfus 6y ago
Can it also be people cancelling slow mobile plans?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
loeg 6y ago
Or selection bias — people only speed-testing their new fast internet plan?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
No idea. As with all truth, you should check with multiple sources for corroboration first. I know in Hawaii at least there was a massive DCCA (chamber of commerce) initiative started way back in 2012 to outfit all public schools with gigabit fiber and all universities with 10gigabit fiber. Hospitals also got fiber connections though I don't know how fast, and there were a few 10gigabit undersea cables laid between the islands themselves. The state government started offering incentives and subsidies to encourage more cable landings on Oahu. This was also the same program in which they began installing the FirstNet system and the 5G infrastructure. No idea what's going on on the mainland. https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadband_Strategic_Plan_Dec_2012.pdf https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadb...
satisfaction 6y ago
This seems more likely than Charter, ATT, et al. investing massive amounts of cash into their networks. I think there would be massive PR campaign if the actually almost doubled available bandwidth in a year. The capacity was always there, they just needed to be paid in order to open it up. I upgraded from 200/10 to 600/35, they just flipped a switch.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  Yep. Service providers didn't ramp up their investments at all into telecom equipment providers during covid, which is impressive. They just had good capacity that was never fully used. They're going slowly on the whole 5G thing now as they don't expect customers to be ready for massive price hikes to their plans. Ultimately the capacity of customers (individuals and businesses) to pay is what drive those investments, regardless of how much everyone claim to need ever increasing bandwidths.
  - satisfaction 6y ago
    After posting that I went back through my invoices and it does appear that at some-point Chart upgraded me from 100/10 to 200/10 at no extra charge.
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  It is both. This number is probably driven by people that are upgrading plans. But the telcom companies are spending billions on expanding infrastructure. Look at the capex numbers for any of the big companies. A lot of it is 5G, but wired as well. https://www.telecomlead.com/5g/att-enhances-capex-to-5-bn-in-q1-targeting-5g-network-expansion-94848 https://www.telecomlead.com/5g/att-enhances-capex-to-5-bn-in...
eru 6y ago
Well, if there's demand, supply often follows.
nhumrich 6y ago
Correlary, how much of this is people _running speed tests from home_ because zoom is slow, etc, where otherwise they wouldn't.
disown 6y ago
Also Zoom classrooms for kids/students. Work and school from home is probably the catalyst for higher inter speeds as employees/parents need faster internet speeds for Zoom. It would also correlate with the rise of Zoom stock price.

thatwasunusual 6y ago

Given it was shit in 2019... so...?

Retric 6y ago

Averaging can give some really unrealistic numbers especially when people are upgrading their home internet to work from home. Upgrading a single connection from 100Mbps to 1Ggbit is hardly the same as upgrading 100 connections from 1Mbps to 10Mbps.

mrlala 6y ago
Completely agree. It would be much more interesting to compare the data in a bin fashion from 2019 -> 2020 like this 0.1 - 1 1-10 10-20 20-50 50+ And then see how ridiculous quote just the average is in this case..
- redisman 6y ago
  I wish there was some attention paid to upload speeds too. A 100Mbps connection often only has 1-5Mbps upload which seriously handicaps it for work and hobbyists.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Hence I consider anything that’s not symmetric fiber to not be worthy of mentioning, because I know you’re getting on upload (and probably latency and packet loss too).
- nightcracker 6y ago
  In other words, the interesting comparison is two log histograms (or overlaid).
  - mrlala 6y ago
    Sure although I would say you can't just throw it into log bins automatically.. some data you need to massage it to what makes the most sense.
  - eru 6y ago
    In general, no need for histograms, if you learn to love cumulative distribution functions (or CDF for short). See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_functi...

lame-robot-hoax 6y ago

I get 300 Mbps down from Xfinity, fine by me. But the paltry 5-6 Mbps I get up with it is BS. Sure, I don’t need 300 up, but for what I’m paying it would be nice to get at least 50.

snazz 6y ago
15 or 20 mbps up is about the theoretical maximum on cable because of how the spectrum is allocated by cable companies. Cable TVs didn't need much upload compared to download.
- kortilla 6y ago
  No, that’s just cable companies allocating significantly more to download spectrum than upload. There isn’t anything fundamental in docsis preventing you from giving more spectrum to upload to have way less contention on the upload slots.
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  While no DOCSIS revision has symmetric theoretical caps, DOCSIS 3.1 which is currently in use is capable of up to 2Gbps upstream, while the upcoming (for the most part) DOCSIS 4.0 standard is capable of up to 6Gbps upstream, and was developed largely to response to increasing demands for upstream bandwidth. While these are obviously best-case speeds, gigabit symmetric is quite achievable with DOCSIS3.1 and available in some markets. However, it is unfortunately true that many cable carriers are constrained in their channel planning by legacy devices with fixed channel requirements. For example, Comcast has at least historically struggled with planning DOCSIS channels around legacy Motorola STBs that require their on-screen guide information on a specific channel. Essentially, in order for Comcast to switch to full DOCSIS3.1 upstream channel allocations they will need to first get every customer with a legacy STB to swap it out for a new one. This is a formidable task and not one they have so far completed, so in my area upstream remains limited to 35Mbps even with 1Gbps downstream.
- lorenzhs 6y ago
  Nah, there are cable companies that offer 50 mbps upstream, and the DOCSIS 3.1 standard that's currently in use supports much more. They're just stingy.

nostromo 6y ago

> there is cause for celebration in Dallas, Seattle and Austin, after our analysis has shown that these cities are performing extremely well relative to most European capital cities. Seattle has some actual competition now, and many (most?) of us can get fiber gigabit to the home for a reasonable rate. It's glorious. I hope other American cities start courting meaningful ISP competition in their cities -- but I'm not holding my breath. Many American city governments see ISPs as companies they can shake down for fees and concessions, not realizing they're only hurting their own citizens by limiting choice and increasing costs.

redisman 6y ago
I need to see whats out there. Still using Xfinity in the suburbs and it's pretty meh, terrible upload making wfh a pain.
archgoon 6y ago
Can you expand on when competition came to Seattle and how? I've been using Condo Internet (now Wave Broadband) for something close to 5-6 years. When was the tipping point in terms of competition?
- nostromo 6y ago
  Centurylink now offers fiber gigabit to the home for about $65 or so a month. It happened because a former mayor (Ed Murray, who has since left office after a personal scandal) made it easier for ISPs to build out their networks and removed homeowners and neighborhood groups from the process which previously allowed them to block things like communications boxes on sidewalks. At the time, a bunch of local columnists moaned about this "corporate giveaway"[1] -- but it's pretty clear in retrospect it was the right move. 1. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-giveaway-sure-to-create-controversy/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-giv...
  - filoleg 6y ago
    Don't forget about Google Webpass, they started advertising heavily in Seattle area starting about a year ago. I switched to them earlier last year due to having periodic issues with WaveG in my new apt building about 8 months into my lease (their technician would come a week or two after I report constant outages, fix something in the server room of my building, and then the issues would start again in a few weeks; haven't had any issues with WaveG at my previous apt though). Service has been great, pricing is even cheaper than WaveG (I pay about $50/mo for their gig fiber offering), no contracts or any other lock-in (unless you pick the option to pay for the whole year upfront for a small discount). It definitely does feel like there is a good amount of real competition in Seattle now.

vmception 6y ago

Has anyone seen how fast Tor has gotten? Its impressive that so many nodes are better and have more bandwidth now

goatsi 6y ago
The incentives for running an exit node keep getting better: https://medium.com/@nusenu/how-malicious-tor-relays-are-exploiting-users-in-2020-part-i-1097575c0cac https://medium.com/@nusenu/how-malicious-tor-relays-are-expl...
- vmception 6y ago
  Seems like you should never hit an exit node then, as a best practice. Just use Onion services, and RDP into another computer and browse the clearnet internet with that.

paxys 6y ago

The title makes it seem like broadband infrastructure in the country significantly improved over the last year, but I'm guessing people just paid more for faster speeds at home.

RyanShook 6y ago
This was my question. Seems highly unlikely that infrastructure improved 91% in a year.
BurningFrog 6y ago
I don't see how paying more raises speed without improving infrastructure?
- jayshua 6y ago
  The extra capacity was already there - speeds were artificially (right word?) suppressed because customers were on a cheaper plan.

paxys 6y ago

What is up with Stockholm? https://fairinternetreport.com/assets/img/research/us-vs-europe/us-vs-eu-cities.png https://fairinternetreport.com/assets/img/research/us-vs-eur...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bagels 6y ago
Bad data science. Why are they fitting what appears to be high order polynomial curves to these data?
henrikschroder 6y ago
There's absolutely no way that can reflect reality. I don't even think it's possible for people to downgrade their speeds that much even if they wanted to. Anecdotal, but I just checked and the slowest speed I can get for my Stockholm apartment is 250/250, and the slowest speed my dad can get for his apartment is 100/100. This has got to be some data anomaly. If they're basing their numbers off of tests that people voluntarily do, then maybe in 2019 a lot of people tested their mobile internet, while no-one bothered testing their home internet because it's fast enough?
Tor3 6y ago
I've been looking at that graph several times and I have no idea how they got those numbers for those European cities.. it's like it's from years ago. The numbers are way too low.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wishinghand 6y ago

While it's great that the average speed is in the mid-30s, it's still just the average. If it was closer to 100 I'd feel more elated by the news, since that means the lower ends would be acceptable no matter where in the USA a user is. Also notable is that a lot of countries in the chart they showed had a 50% or more increase over 2019.

noahtallen 6y ago
Good point. I imagine the average is going up because the already fast speeds in cities are just getting faster with fiber and faster cable connections.

olyjohn 6y ago

Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster. For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data, what good does the speed do? The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet. Rural communities stuck with 1.5MBps DSL or even slower can't even have 2 kids in school learning virtually. Imagine if you had 1 remote parent working from home, and 2 kids trying to do school. Most rural internet just won't cut it. I feel terrible for people having to deal with our shit connectivity in this country.

munk-a 6y ago
> The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet. Infrastructure isn't free and while it's hilariously embarrassing to have slow speeds in "rural cities" (i.e. actual cities that just don't happen to be on the coast) simply due to capitalism doing it's worst - living in the middle of no where is an expense on society. It falls into the same camp as people who live in hurricane areas - the government bailing you out once so you can move is a fine idea (and the government needs to be providing sufficient funds for these people to actually relocate) but living in remote areas and living coastally in the south east come with lots of benefits to you... and costs for everyone else. I am A-OK with folks who insist on living in the middle of nowhere paying for it. Oh I'm going to add a big old caveat for people who were forcefully relocated - if you're living on Rosebud Indian Reservation then relocation really isn't an option.
- SteveGerencser 6y ago
  You do realize that roughly 100% of your food comes from those rural areas that you so casually throw away as an expense on society? Add to that, telecom companies have been collecting additional "fees" from every user for decades that was supposed to go for expanding infrastructure and never has been.
floatingatoll 6y ago
4K movie seeking on consumer devices can be dramatically faster when you increase from 50mbit/s to 400mbit/s, even though you'll still download just as much movie as you would on either speed. We're talking the difference between 5-10 seconds of buffering and beginning playback immediately. Video game updates also accelerate dramatically, allowing more efficient use of free time. Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year, even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882 Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering internet to that area. Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has stable latency in that scenario.

astrophysician 6y ago

For the uninitiated: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

kstrauser 6y ago
I wonder how long that'll keep up? I already have gigabit fiber, and by that graph he will too. But then what? Faster is better, but 10Gb wouldn't be much of an improvement in practice over what I have today. Game update servers don't saturate my bandwidth, and we can have multiple people streaming 4K video at once without blinking an eye. What would be the next thing pushing faster speeds?
- deadmutex 6y ago
  Downstream speed is only one part of the equation. I think if we look at upload speeds, and latency, there's still a lot of room to improve for a large section of the population. I would love to have the ability to do wireless cloud VR gaming in my home.
- cambalache 6y ago
  High(er) resolution video, VR feeds, games (last COD was 250GB) plus all the unknown future applications
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    4K streams only need 20Mb. Assume 8K is 4x at worst.
    - deadmutex 6y ago
      How much do you think this display would need? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw, also assuming HDR and 60fps+
- deadmutex 6y ago

deadmutex 6y ago

I wish more attention was paid to upload speed and latency to the rest of the internet too. People are backing up more personal videos than ever (including cloud connected security cameras, etc.). Latency is also very important to lower actual transfer times (since it will allow TCP to take full advantage of the bandwidth available). Latency also will be helpful for new experiences like Stadia and Geforce Now.

Tor3 6y ago
The latency is not a problem as long as you avoid packet losses. If you have losses then you pay dearly if there's latency. The latency itself doesn't present a problem, the TCP window size increases and takes care of that. The problem is packet losses, because (even with 'intelligent' retransmission) there's a lot of (the buffered) window to retransmit and then the performance dies. When the packet losses stay low, say, 0.001%, the latency is not an issue. (At work I did months of testing on TCP performance for a 900ms rtt high-speed link) But yes, upload speed is more important than ever. For my work-from-home setup I need to transfer lots of data both ways. And for my "cloud" backup etc. I need to push large amounts of data out of the house. And with fiber I get that, fortunately.

war1025 6y ago

What I've concluded from measuring things on my home network is that my cheapo old router is actually only giving maybe a third of the download speed my ISP is providing me. I'd guess that is the case for a non-trivial subset of the population. And I mean I get ~15Mbps to my laptop when my connection gives me 50Mpbs, nowhere near something like gigabit which I'd guess is just an excuse for ISPs to fleece money out of people in all but a small minority of cases where people buy it. But also I have zero incentive to upgrade my router because the internet is "fast enough" for everything I need, even with only using a small fraction of the available bandwidth. Edit: Also to the headline of the article, my ISP doubled the base internet rate from 25Mpbs to 50Mpbs this year. So I guess the report lines up with my reality quite well.

hnuser123456 6y ago
Wow, I can't imagine being in your shoes at all. I would immediately go to the store and get a cheap semi-modern router for $50 to get my full ISP speeds, especially when missing 2/3 of it. Even a 10 year old 802.11n AP ought to be able to get you 50mbps at reasonable range.
- war1025 6y ago
  I probably should get a new router. It's sort of become low priority. The main signal issue is that our router is in the garage next to where our internet comes in. For a few weeks in the spring I was looking at setting up a wired network since all the phone jacks in our house are actually Cat5e cable that could be upgraded to ethernet jacks pretty easily. But then I also lost ambition for that idea. I did spend $20 a couple months ago to get a latest-generation wifi chip for my laptop, which I'd recommend to anyone since it's a trivial thing to upgrade and I never even realized the wifi chips were swapable. That improved my network speed by a factor of two I think.
  - war1025 6y ago
    For the record in case anyone goes back this far in the comments, this exchange did finally push me over the edge and I ordered a new router.

jcrawfordor 6y ago

I wonder how much of this is an artifact of people increasing their bandwidth subscriptions vs. the investment of various DOCSIS operators in Node+1 architecture, which at least in this area rapidly accelerated over the last year - I don't think that has anything to do with COVID per se but just the incumbent ISP really getting to the main stages of that project right now.

GNOMES 6y ago

I hate that across the highway near by (Houston) is ATT Fiber with 1G up and 1G down for around a 100$/month. I moved across the highway, and now stuck with Xfinity coaxial 1GB down and around 50MB up if I am lucky for 150$/month including no data cap fee. I don't understand why a company like Xfinity with such negative public image wouldn't try to give everyone a speed bump to improve their image.

devonkim 6y ago
When one has eliminated competition in its operating markets, public perception doesn’t matter anymore.

cm2187 6y ago

I am surprised France is so low. They are rolling out fibre to the premise with gigabit connections in every big city and even in many smaller cities and villages.

Bayart 6y ago
It's probably down to the dataset. I went looking for their source and it's not anything I've ever heard about. Most Europeans would probably be more familiar with Speedtest.net [1], which seems like a closer match to reality (with France having descent broadband coverage and trash mobile). [1] https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

fxtentacle 6y ago

Those diagrams seem completely unreliable to me. I know multiple founders who have 1gbit/s fiber lines to their homes in Berlin. Plus all 3 major providers (1&1, Telekom, O2) offer up to 250mbit/s there. Also, you expect me to believe that the internet speeds in France and Germany magically went down from 2017 to 2018 and 2019? BTW, my guess would be that most people stay at around 30mbit because it's good enough for 4K YouTube streaming and still affordable.

unnouinceput 6y ago

Quote: "1 Denmark; 2 Switzerland; 3 Sweden; 4 Netherlands; 5 Finland; 6 Belgium; 7 Norway; 8 Germany; 9 UK; 10 Poland; 11 Spain; 12 Ireland; 13 France; 14 Austria; 15 Italy" Riight! Cause Europe is only those countries. Conveniently forget about your king when comes to Europe in terms of internet speed?

cambalache 6y ago
Spain "barely" makes it into Europe for most Americans. There is 0 chance for small central and eastern European countries.

lightlyused 6y ago

Recently my upload speed dropped from 50mbps to 10mbps. Trying to get the ISP to address the issue is like taking to a brick wall. The tech they sent out couldn't find anything wrong, but hinted that it was configured that way and there was nothing I could do to get it changed since the ISP wouldn't guarantee the upstream speed. We really need a functioning FCC to get this now critical infrastructure fixed.

hnracer 6y ago

I guess they mean bandwidth and not speed per se

musicale 6y ago

Let me know once internet service in the US compares favorably in cost and speed to internet service in South Korea.

johnfn 6y ago
Let me know when the US has comparable square mileage and population density to South Korea :P
- travisporter 6y ago
  Hey letting you both know that Sweden has the same population density as the US with better broadband.
  - wahern 6y ago
    The U.S. actually has similar weighted population density to most of Europe. Simply dividing the total population by total area is a very poor metric, especially for a country like the U.S. which just has an enormous amount of unpopulated land area. An example of a weighted population density metric is the local density of the median household. Unfortunately, weighted metrics are rather new and last I looked I couldn't find population numbers using the same metric. The U.S. Census Bureau uses a metric based on census tract as the local area; EU uses square kilometer. For that and other reasons the published data isn't directly comparable (at least not easily). But to a first approximation the U.S. and Europe seem very similar--the U.S. is far more dense than commonly believed, and Europe less dense than commonly believed. Of course, even with a better metric I presume South Korea is in another league entirely.
  - dudul 6y ago
    And how much of Sweden's population is concentrated in the southern quarter of the country? 80%? Dumb average density doesn't reflect the reality of population's distribution.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago

gnicholas 6y ago

I wonder if their method of excluding cellular connections treated tethered computers as cellular. When I saw the headline my first thought was that speed tests run over LTE could account for some of the difference (but not reflect people's primary internet connections). > Speed test data for cellular connections was excluded from our analysis by using MaxMind's Connection Type database

twsted 6y ago

The problem in Italy is that many parts of the territory have abysmal service. In Milan most people have 1G / 1G unlimited for ~40€ / month, which is not bad.

dkdk8283 6y ago

Let’s call this a speed:cost competition then rank. I pay a shitload for asymmetric download. I piss faster than upload.

0xy 6y ago

Net neutrality is abolished, and internet speeds get substantially faster. In total, since abolition, internet speeds are up more than double. I find that very interesting, given the amount of NN proponents (including academics) claiming internet speed would grind to a halt.

th0ma5 6y ago
Considering speeds are still pretty awful, I'm not sure it is something to really celebrate... it is maybe a good start, but it is pretty late.
- 0xy 6y ago
  According to Speedtest the average US speed is 165 down 62 up, or to put it another way it's enough for the average household to stream SIX simultaneous 4K-quality streams while also uploading photos and video chatting with friends. How is that "pretty awful"?
  - th0ma5 6y ago
    What's the spread tho?
    - th0ma5 6y ago
      So I mean I went here https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index ... and it is basically average broadband speed... I mean... that excludes pretty much everyone without access to broadband. And doesn't say anything about caps, which, let's face it, reduces your monthly throughput to an instantaneous average well well below average, and approaching dialup speeds. All of these issues... access, caps, average vs. median vs. minimum vs. maximum speeds... are all things that would be handled by regulation.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

5G to home and Starlink are the barbarians at the gates of the Comcast Empire.

duskwuff 6y ago
... not really. US cellular services have absolutely miserable data caps compared to wired ISPs (yes, even on "unlimited" plans). The increased speeds of 5G are basically irrelevant if you get throttled after downloading 50 GB in a month. This is a problem that cell providers could solve pretty easily -- but they've had that option for years, and it seems like they'd rather not. Starlink is density-limited. There's a finite amount of satellite capacity available to any amount of ground, and they can't target upgrades to specific geographic regions. They're a great upgrade from existing satellite Internet services, but they aren't going to replace terrestrial services for most people who have that option.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Commodity 5G can solve last mile to fiber stations. It doesn't have to be telcos. Starlink will eat into exurbs, outer suburbs, and disgruntled customers. Both will be viable competition at the 200 mbit level, and will drive down Comcast costs.

austincheney 6y ago

Some ISPs offer 10gbps packages to the house. I have no idea how to take full use of 1gbps pipe.

williamsharris 6y ago

Yeh, internet speed is getting faster all the time.

tehjoker 6y ago

Would have liked to see Asian countries in the comparison.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I fully believe Austin can thank Google Fiber for its speed increase. Not necessarily because that many people actually have Google Fiber - it's rollout has been patchy, delayed, and with Fiber rollouts in other cities halted, I'm not holding my breath to get Fiber in my neighborhood. But Fiber definitely spurned the absolutely shitty incumbents (Time Warner/Spectrum and AT&T) to up their game. Funny how competition works like that. Good article on the topic: https://www.statesman.com/business/20200103/high-speed-high-impact-how-google-fiberrsquos-arrival-changed-things-in-austin https://www.statesman.com/business/20200103/high-speed-high-...

lokimedes 6y ago

Just to bring some data to the conversation, the price for 1Gps symmetric fiber is $78/mo here in the rural parts of Denmark. That also includes a bunch of other incentives such as streaming services, mesh WiFi hardware that is kept up to date as new technologies arrive. https://www.waoo.dk/fibernet/ https://www.waoo.dk/fibernet/ We had a large push from the power companies back in the early 2000’s bringing fiber to homes that was outside the metropolitan areas. This has kept competition going across the country between cable, xDSL, 4-5G and fiber.

Dahoon 6y ago
Seems higher than average to me. US$45 is what I pay for 1/1Gbps in Denmark. You could likely switch and get better service on the same network for less. For English readers this is in English instead of Danish: https://kviknet.dk/en/ https://kviknet.dk/en/

aunty_helen 6y ago

Something interesting I recently found out is that New Zealand has just started offering 4gb/4gb connections. There's always a lot of discussion around cable companies and monopolies etc whenever internet is brought up so I'll explain how NZ has done so well, In the 2010s the govt decided they we're going to 'fibre to the home' most of the country. They did so by public private partnerships allocated by regions. Most of the regions went to one company but that hasn't been too much of a problem. The 2nd largest city went to a competitor etc. These companies now own part of the fibre network but don't necessarily sell to consumers. ISP's buy time off the fibre due to something that was done in the early 2000s with the advent of DSL called "Unbundling the local loop". This means anyone can setup an ISP and sell to you using the "governments" fibre. This has resulted in plenty of competition and meant that NZ has gone from lagging behind many countries to now far exceeding. Datacaps were the bane of many 2000s internet consumers 25gb for $x with 256kbs download etc. when USA connections were unlimited 256kbs for half the cost. Another interesting thing that's happened with the rollout of fibre across the land, business connections are now very similar in price to consumer connections. You can also now get business connections to your home and without any additional infrastructure. Just a few years ago a business connection might cost you 2000NZD a month and require an expensive install. Now that the only difference is a SLA, you're looking around 150NZD in comparison to a 100NZD "home" connection. Something I think NZ has done well and could be a good model for other countries.

stevenjohns 6y ago
There needs to be a bipartisan political will for it which is hard to capture. Australia tried to follow the same model only for a more conservative government to get in, claim that it was too expensive, butcher the plans (fibre to the node instead of to the premise) to "save costs" the country was left with a more expensive half-baked product that still incorporated a lot of copper. What's worse is that because there was a "government fibre" model it meant that private industry that wanted to lay its own fibre started facing various endless legal issues[0], which, funny enough, is entirely supported by the originally less conservative political groups that pushed for the rollout in the first place. So now we're left with a bad network and legal structures in place to stop it from being privately superseded. [0] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/tpg-calls-for-nbn-protectionism-to-end-554297 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/tpg-calls-for-nbn-protectioni...

bashwizard 6y ago

It's amazing how far behind the US have been. I remember getting 100/100 Mbit fiber included in my rent 15 years ago here in Sweden.

codezero 6y ago

For a big chunk of the stay-at-home order, didn’t a bunch of providers remove caps/limits? Seems like that alone would cause a huge increase in home speeds.

BatteryMountain 6y ago
In South Africa most fibre providers doubled the speed, aka 50/50 became 100/100 for 3 months without increasing the price. It has since been reverted.

MarkSweep 6y ago

I recently switched from Comcast to AT&T Fiber, and yes, my speeds are up according to speed tests. But on certain routes I only get 30Kbps (sometimes to Azure!). Wikipedia and Twitter only loads half the time. Sites that don't use TLS sometimes load a gibberish. So yes, the speed is faster, but I kinda want to switch back to Comcast. And don't get me started about the idiotic, mandatory $10/month shitty router they require you to use.

underlines 6y ago

I should move back to Switzerland. Shortly before I left in 2016, we had a small ISP, init7 providing symmetrical 1Gbps connections for 70 USD. In 2020 they get 10Gbit for 50 USD... Meanwhile I pay 60USD for a 50Mbps asymmetrical connection in Bangkok.

anonytrary 6y ago

I feel personally attacked. My average before was 60mbps and now it's 115. Not to mention CMCSA stock is up 40%...

Totoradio 6y ago

Weird to see Paris just under 20Mbps, the whole city is covered with fiber

Dahoon 6y ago

1) 30mbps isn't broadband in 2020. Maybe in 2000. 2) Those numbers for EU are incorrect. Look at Stockholm for one. It is at a minimum 2x too low. Even Denmark which is in top is too low. I live in Denmark and even if I pick cable the lowest I can even order is 300Mbit/s. But that would just be stupidity since I can just click on Fiber and get 1/1Gbit/s for US$45.

unishark 6y ago

> American internet users have had a very good 2020: according to research performed by FairInternetReport, median US internet speeds in 2020 doubled to 33.16mbps, up from 17.34mbps in 2019. Covering the five years of 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the largest speed increase seen in the US, with speeds staying essentially the same in 2016 and 2017 (8.91mbps and 9.08mbps respectively), and 2018 recording a median speed of 12.83mbps. It just seems faster when measured in millibits per second.

hedora 6y ago

No mention of upload speeds or data caps. On those fronts, my internet has gotten slower in recent years (and I’m paying more). Thanks Comcast.

hedora 6y ago

It’s interesting that larger countries have lower median speeds. It suggests that ISP’s should not be allowed to serve more than about a million people. I wonder what other industries have inverse scaling properties like this.

disown 6y ago

The power of WFM and Zoom classrooms. If there is one thing people will pay extra for, it's their employment and especially their kids' schooling. When a school tells a parent that they need high speed internet for their kids's Zoom classroom, they'll pay for it. Anyone older people with kids know if schools subsidized parents for high internet connections?

partingshots 6y ago

Gigabit level speed for commercial users wasn’t even imaginable until Google came along, and all of sudden, everybody and their mother seemed to be offering it as if it had somehow always been a part of their rollout plans. A little bit annoying to say the least.

stunt 6y ago

I've switched to 1Gbps from 50Mbps this year since I work from home now. I assume there are many more like me everywhere.