Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris get faster, cheaper broadband than US cities
Tokyo is one of the world's leading cities for high-speed Internet access. — Kondo Atsush — A new study from the New America Foundation suggests that the United States is lagging in the broadband speed race.
Context & Ripple Effects
The finding is a rerun with sharper teeth. The US was already flagged as slow against international peers back in 2007 (U.S. lags behind leaders in Internet speed), ranked 26th in a broadband index by 2010 (US ranks 26th in new broadband index), and the FCC's own May 2011 report conceded lagging adoption and speed (U.S. lagging in broadband adoption, speed: FCC report). What the New America Foundation adds on July 20, 2012 is the price axis: Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris aren't just faster per its study, they're cheaper than comparable US cities.
That two-axis framing — speed AND cost — travels further than the earlier rankings. The story syndicated to The Verge and SlashGear alongside New America's own posting, giving a think-tank study unusually wide consumer-tech reach, and Kondo Atsush's photography of Tokyo anchors the comparison in a visible leading market.
First-order effects
- US urban broadband subscribers face a documented value gap: the same cities' residents pay more for connections slower than what Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris customers get, per the New America Foundation's measurements.
- The FCC enters 2013 with an independent think tank corroborating the lag it reported in its own May 2011 assessment — external validation that narrows room to frame the problem as a measurement artifact.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent US carriers now compete against an internationally benchmarked price-performance comparison that advocacy groups and city governments can cite directly, raising pressure for faster tiers or lower pricing in major metros.
- The repeated third-party rankings give municipal governments and regional providers ammunition to argue for alternative infrastructure buildouts rather than waiting on incumbent upgrades.
Third-order effects
- With lag findings recurring across five years of studies from different outlets (LA Times 2007, USA Today 2007, Computerworld 2010, Reuters 2011, New America 2012), the issue shifts from technical curiosity to a standing policy question about whether market structure or geography explains the gap.
- If the pattern holds, the likely battleground moves to city-level action and federal broadband policy, where the cost-of-slow-Internet argument becomes a lever for subsidy and competition debates.
The trend: International broadband benchmarks have hardened into a recurring annual scorecard, and each new study pairing speed with price converts the US lag from a statistic into a consumer-policy grievance.