February 23, 2022
A new analysis by George Ford of the Phoenix Center finds that only a few small, densely populated nations rival US broadband performance. The research covers 4,480 cities with populations of 50,000 people or more in 98 countries and is based on speed measurements by Ookla — taken via 135 million tests over 39.3 million unique devices — from the third and fourth quarters of 2021.
According to the analysis:
- US mean download speeds, at 204.7 megabits per second, are faster than those of any other global region, both in the full sample and the “high income” sample.
- US upload speeds are second only to East Asia, mostly because the US relies more on asynchronous cable modem networks while Asia has more synchronous fiber-to-the-premises connections.
- Of the 98 individual countries sampled, the US ranks fifth in download speeds and 28th in upload speeds.
Read the research paper: https://www.phoenix-center.org/PolicyBulletin/PCPB54Final.pdf