Speedtest Market Report: US average fixed broadband download speeds reach 54.97 megabits per second, up 42% YoY, uploads at 18.88 Mbps, up 51% YoY
Speedtest has released its mid-year broadband speeds report, and there's actually quite a bit of good news in there.
Context & Ripple Effects
Speedtest's mid-2016 numbers land in a measurement landscape where the scoreboards disagree sharply: Akamai's Q2 2015 study put average US connection speed at just 11.7 Mbps, 20th globally, while Speedtest's own methodology now reports fixed broadband downloads at 54.97 Mbps a year later. The gap is less about whose numbers are right than about what each measures — and Speedtest's 42% download and 51% upload growth rates are the fastest prints either firm has shown in this coverage.
The standout signal is the asymmetry narrowing: uploads growing faster than downloads inverts the historical shape of US broadband, where providers engineered for download-heavy consumption.
First-order effects
- US households on fixed broadband see materially faster connections within a year, and the providers Speedtest later ranks at the top — Comcast Xfinity and Verizon — gain a marketing scoreboard they can cite directly to subscribers.
Second-order effects
- Speedtest's report becomes a competitive weapon: with Akamai's 2015 global data showing only 5.2% of users on broadband-speed connections, providers have an incentive to optimize for whichever measurement firm's methodology flatters their network, pushing investment toward tested peak speeds rather than worst-case performance.
Third-order effects
- If upload growth keeps outpacing download growth — a pattern Ookla's 2018 US broadband report would echo — the download-asymmetric architecture of consumer broadband erodes, favoring two-way workloads like cloud backup and video publishing and pressuring tiered plans built around download caps.
The trend: US broadband speeds are compounding at double-digit annual rates with uploads now leading downloads, and independent measurement firms — Ookla's Speedtest and Akamai — are the de facto referees shaping how providers compete.