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

&gt; 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.<p>Seattle has some <i>actual</i> competition now, and many (most?) of us can get fiber gigabit to the home for a reasonable rate. It&#x27;s glorious.<p>I hope other American cities start courting meaningful ISP competition in their cities -- but I&#x27;m not holding my breath. Many American city governments see ISPs as companies they can shake down for fees and concessions, not realizing they&#x27;re only hurting their own citizens by limiting choice and increasing costs.

I fully believe Austin can thank Google Fiber for its speed increase. Not necessarily because that many people actually have Google Fiber - it&#x27;s rollout has been patchy, delayed, and with Fiber rollouts in other cities halted, I&#x27;m not holding my breath to get Fiber in my neighborhood.<p>But Fiber definitely spurned the absolutely shitty incumbents (Time Warner&#x2F;Spectrum and AT&amp;T) to up their game. Funny how competition works like that. Good article on the topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statesman.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;20200103&#x2F;high-speed-high-impact-how-google-fiberrsquos-arrival-changed-things-in-austin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statesman.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;20200103&#x2F;high-speed-high-...</a>

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.

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

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.

What is up with Stockholm? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fairinternetreport.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;img&#x2F;research&#x2F;us-vs-europe&#x2F;us-vs-eu-cities.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fairinternetreport.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;img&#x2F;research&#x2F;us-vs-eur...</a>

The title makes it seem like broadband infrastructure in the country significantly improved over the last year, but I&#x27;m guessing people just paid more for faster speeds at home.

Something interesting I recently found out is that New Zealand has just started offering 4gb&#x2F;4gb connections.<p>There&#x27;s always a lot of discussion around cable companies and monopolies etc whenever internet is brought up so I&#x27;ll explain how NZ has done so well,<p>In the 2010s the govt decided they we&#x27;re going to &#x27;fibre to the home&#x27; most of the country.<p>They did so by public private partnerships allocated by regions. Most of the regions went to one company but that hasn&#x27;t been too much of a problem. The 2nd largest city went to a competitor etc.<p>These companies now own part of the fibre network but don&#x27;t necessarily sell to consumers. ISP&#x27;s buy time off the fibre due to something that was done in the early 2000s with the advent of DSL called &quot;Unbundling the local loop&quot;. This means anyone can setup an ISP and sell to you using the &quot;governments&quot; fibre. This has resulted in plenty of competition and meant that NZ has gone from lagging behind many countries to now far exceeding.<p>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.<p>Another interesting thing that&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;re looking around 150NZD in comparison to a 100NZD &quot;home&quot; connection.<p>Something I think NZ has done well and could be a good model for other countries.

Just to bring some data to the conversation, the price for 1Gps symmetric fiber is $78&#x2F;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. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waoo.dk&#x2F;fibernet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waoo.dk&#x2F;fibernet&#x2F;</a><p>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.

It&#x27;s amazing how far behind the US have been. I remember getting 100&#x2F;100 Mbit fiber included in my rent 15 years ago here in Sweden.

I hate that across the highway near by (Houston) is ATT Fiber with 1G up and 1G down for around a 100$&#x2F;month. I moved across the highway, and now stuck with Xfinity coaxial 1GB down and around 50MB up if I am lucky for 150$&#x2F;month including no data cap fee.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why a company like Xfinity with such negative public image wouldn&#x27;t try to give everyone a speed bump to improve their image.

While it&#x27;s great that the average speed is in the mid-30s, it&#x27;s still just the average. If it was closer to 100 I&#x27;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.<p>Also notable is that a lot of countries in the chart they showed had a 50% or more increase over 2019.

What I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;d guess that is the case for a non-trivial subset of the population.<p>And I mean I get ~15Mbps to my laptop when my connection gives me 50Mpbs, nowhere near something like gigabit which I&#x27;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.<p>But also I have zero incentive to upgrade my router because the internet is &quot;fast enough&quot; for everything I need, even with only using a small fraction of the available bandwidth.<p>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.

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

&gt; 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.<p>It just seems faster when measured in millibits per second.

Those diagrams seem completely unreliable to me.<p>I know multiple founders who have 1gbit&#x2F;s fiber lines to their homes in Berlin. Plus all 3 major providers (1&amp;1, Telekom, O2) offer up to 250mbit&#x2F;s there.<p>Also, you expect me to believe that the internet speeds in France and Germany magically went down from 2017 to 2018 and 2019?<p>BTW, my guess would be that most people stay at around 30mbit because it&#x27;s good enough for 4K YouTube streaming and still affordable.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t guarantee the upstream speed. We really need a functioning FCC to get this now critical infrastructure fixed.

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&#x27;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.

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

Would have liked to see Asian countries in the comparison.

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

I recently switched from Comcast to AT&amp;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&#x27;t use TLS sometimes load a gibberish.<p>So yes, the speed is faster, but I kinda want to switch back to Comcast. And don&#x27;t get me started about the idiotic, mandatory $10&#x2F;month shitty router they require you to use.

For a big chunk of the stay-at-home order, didn’t a bunch of providers remove caps&#x2F;limits? Seems like that alone would cause a huge increase in home speeds.

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.

The problem in Italy is that many parts of the territory have abysmal service.<p>In Milan most people have 1G &#x2F; 1G unlimited for ~40€ &#x2F; month, which is not bad.

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&#x27;s primary internet connections).<p>&gt; <i>Speed test data for cellular connections was excluded from our analysis by using MaxMind&#x27;s Connection Type database</i>

I wish more attention was paid to upload speed and latency to the rest of the internet too.<p>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.

The power of WFM and Zoom classrooms. If there is one thing people will pay extra for, it&#x27;s their employment and especially their kids&#x27; schooling. When a school tells a parent that they need high speed internet for their kids&#x27;s Zoom classroom, they&#x27;ll pay for it.<p>Anyone older people with kids know if schools subsidized parents for high internet connections?

1) 30mbps isn&#x27;t broadband in 2020. Maybe in 2000.<p>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&#x2F;s. But that would just be stupidity since I can just click on Fiber and get 1&#x2F;1Gbit&#x2F;s for US$45.

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.<p>A little bit annoying to say the least.

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

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...<p>Meanwhile I pay 60USD for a 50Mbps asymmetrical connection in Bangkok.

For those too lazy to read the article, it&#x27;s 91% faster in 2020 as compared to 2019.

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.<p>I wonder what other industries have inverse scaling properties like this.

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

For the uninitiated:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;law-of-bandwidth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;law-of-bandwidth&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve switched to 1Gbps from 50Mbps this year since I work from home now. I assume there are many more like me everywhere.

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

I feel personally attacked. My average before was 60mbps and now it&#x27;s 115. Not to mention CMCSA stock is up 40%...

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

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

I guess they mean bandwidth and not speed per se

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

Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there&#x27;s no point to having internet any faster.<p>For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data. If you can&#x27;t transfer large amounts of data, what good does the speed do?<p>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&#x27;t even have 2 kids in school learning virtually.<p>Imagine if you had 1 remote parent working from home, and 2 kids trying to do school. Most rural internet just won&#x27;t cut it. I feel terrible for people having to deal with our shit connectivity in this country.

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

Yeh, internet speed is getting faster all the time.

Quote: &quot;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&quot;<p>Riight! Cause Europe is only those countries. Conveniently forget about your king when comes to Europe in terms of internet speed?