US ranks 26th in new broadband index
IDG News Service - South Korea has the fastest home Internet service in the world, with a downstream speed 100 times faster than the average in Sudan, the operator of Speedtest.net reported on a new Web site that compiles results from consumers running its online test.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third straight year a major measurement has put the US mid-pack on broadband speed. A 2007 Computerworld report flagged the gap early, and Akamai ranked the US 33rd in its July 2009 state-of-the-internet figures, behind Slovakia on connections above 2Mbps.
What is new here is the methodology and the messenger: Speedtest.net's operator is launching an index built from consumers running its own test, a crowdsourced complement to Akamai's server-side logs — and it lands on the same conclusion, with the US at 26th while South Korea leads by a wide margin over laggards like Sudan.
First-order effects
- US consumers now have two independently produced league tables — Akamai's and Speedtest.net's — that both place American home connections far below South Korea's, making 'the US is slow' a repeated finding rather than a one-off.
Second-order effects
- ISPs and policymakers lose the ability to dismiss any single methodology as flawed, since server-side and consumer-run measurements converge on the same ranking; expect broadband speed tables to become ammunition in US infrastructure and regulatory debates.
Third-order effects
- If successive indexes keep anchoring on South Korea as the reference point, national broadband performance becomes a standing international benchmark that shapes where carriers and governments direct network investment — a pattern the prior Akamai and Computerworld reports had already started.
The trend: Broadband speed is hardening into an annually tracked, internationally compared metric, with crowdsourced test platforms joining server-network operators in setting the scoreboard.