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The US Has Some of the World's Fastest Internet—If You Live in the Right State

There's mixed news in this "State of the Internet" report.
Image: Bob Mical/Flickr

Fresh in from a long weekend celebrating America's birth and cooking outside, it's time to admit that, while we might be the world's oldest surviving federation, the United States remains squarely in the middle of the pack when it comes to internet speed.

There's some silver linings in Akamai's “State of the Internet Report,” though. The good news is that worldwide over the first quarter of 2014, internet speeds are getting faster. The global average connection speed inched up another 1.8 percent over the quarter to reach 3.9 mbps.

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And American internet is improving as part of this. The average connection speed in the US is now 10.5mpbs, which is up 31 percent from a year ago, and puts us ahead of, um, Canada where the average is 9.5 mbps. Still, we've got a long way to go before we can challenge the unstoppable juggernaut of South Korean internet.

Image: Akamai State of the Internet Report

For those who follow things like national average connection speeds, the fact that US doesn't crack the world's top 10 won't come as a surprise. It's been well established that American internet users pay more and get less than their counterparts in East Asia and Europe, thanks to a monopolistic block of ISPs that have insulated themselves from competing against each other.

"We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies,” former Obama advisor Susan Crawford told the BBC in March. “So left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."

Other studies have shown that broadband in the United States operates at speeds comparable to anywhere else in the world, but it isn't distributed evenly. As the Consumerist points out, “the sheer size—both geographically and in terms of population—of the US makes it difficult for our average numbers to beat those of countries with significantly smaller user bases and higher population densities.”

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Image: Akamai State of the Internet Report

If, as a point of comparison, you just looked at the states, we come off a little better: The fastest states—Virginia, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island—clock in ahead of all but Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. Geographic challenges and low population densities do seem consistent with the states with the slowest average speeds: Alaska, Montana, Kentucky and Arkansas. Except for Michigan and Utah, the states with fastest internet are densely populated and in the Boston-Washington corridor.

The US does have a high percentage of people who have access to broadband, but they're paying far more for it. An OECD report on broadband prices, high speeds of 45 Mbps and over, ranked the US 30th out of 33 countries, with an average price of $90 a month.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Crawford explained that, in America, “the rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality.”

After spending a weekend drunk and proud, it's fairly sobering to get back to work and remember that the internet here is slow, expensive, and creating our own national digital divide.