We're Number 9! U.S. Slips in Internet Connection Ranking
Here's something to add to your decline-of-the-empire files: the U.S. is falling further behind in world rankings of average Internet connection speeds. — That's the verdict from the latest State of the Internet Report by Akamai …
Context & Ripple Effects
The result extends a long-running pattern: 2007 coverage found the U.S. behind other countries on broadband speed, and a 2011 FCC report also flagged gaps in both adoption and speed. Akamai's own data earlier in 2013 indicated that broadband gains were unevenly distributed.
That history makes the ranking more than a single-quarter scoreboard: it supplies a common benchmark for a U.S. broadband debate already centered on both network performance and access.
First-order effects
- Akamai's ninth-place measurement gives the FCC, broadband providers, and U.S. customers a comparable benchmark for a performance gap that earlier coverage had already documented.
- The national ranking foregrounds a disparity Akamai had identified in its data: aggregate speed improvements do not describe service quality evenly across U.S. users.
Second-order effects
- Broadband providers face greater pressure to distinguish local network improvements from national averages, because Akamai's international comparison makes relative performance the reference point.
- For the FCC, the report reinforces that adoption and speed cannot be treated as separate problems; earlier agency coverage had identified both as U.S. weaknesses.
Third-order effects
- If repeated international comparisons continue to show the same gap, broadband policy and provider competition will be judged increasingly on comparable service performance rather than on the existence of access alone.
The trend: Broadband is becoming a comparative infrastructure market in which national rankings expose the difference between incremental network gains and relative global performance.