U.S. Now 27th Globally With Average Speed of 33.9 Mbps
Data pulled from Ookla suggests that the average downstream US connection speed has jumped 10 Mbps in the last year to 33.9 Mbps. That said, the US improvements were only enough to push it to 27th among the 199 countries ranked by average downstream speed. Globally, the average downstream speed is currently 22.3 Mbps. While the US is ahead of the UK (30.18 Mbps), Germany (29.95 Mbps), Spain (28.28 Mbps), Russia (27.7 Mbps) and Ireland (27.29 Mbps), it remains well behind Asian countries like South Korea (84.31 Mbps) and Japan (60.49 Mbps).
According to the data, the fastest average US states are Washington (45.6 Mbps), Missouri (41.21 Mbps), New York (40.86 Mbps) California 40.8 Mbps, and Utah 40.47 Mbps.
The top ten cities in terms of average broadband speeds were Kansas City, MO (96.66 Mbps), Austin, TX (74.65 Mbps), Huntington Beach, CA (58.2 Mbps), New York, NY (53.3 Mbps)
and North Hollywood, CA (53.04 Mbps).
The US jump is thanks largely to the relatively inexpensive upgrades cable operators are making to DOCSIS 3.0. Cable operators are just starting to explore upgrading to DOCSIS 3.1, which should result in a number of 1 Gbps cable deployments starting in 2016. Google Fiber -- offering the fastest average connection among ISPs at 230.69Mbps (compared to 42.27Mbps for Verizon FiOS) can also be thanked for much of the improvement.
Of course it's not all roses. While cable operators have been relatively busy upgrading networks, their DSL competitors have not. In fact, companies like AT&T and Verizon have been busy backing away from markets they don't deem worth upgrading, giving cable less serious competition than ever before. So while higher speeds are great, less serious competition means higher prices and worse customer service. And when it comes to companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast, they already offer the worst customer service across any industry. Fast is great -- we all love fast connections -- but it's increasingly only a part of the conversation in an industry that often doesn't really want to seriously talk about price or availability.
You can peruse the full data set
here.