A recent article from The New York Times tech blog compared high-speed Internet use around the world to see if it’s true that many other countries get faster, cheaper and more widely available broadband service than the U.S..
They found that in Japan, broadband service of 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month. So they get three times the speed at about a third of the price.
In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps. That’s quite a difference.
But if you take into consideration that Japan, Korea and Sweden have made significant investment in their fiber optic networks, the United States may not be too far behind. Japan’s average speed is about 16.7 Mbps. Sweden was 8.8 Mbps. And Korea averaged 7.2 Mbps.
In countries that haven’t made the investment in infrastructure we see average download speeds ranging from 3.2 Mbps in Italy to 6.4 Mbps in Germany, according to a study by the Saïd Business School at Oxford. The United States has an average download speed of 5.2 Mbps.
But Internet speeds in the United States are getting faster. Verizon’s fiber optic service, FiOS, offers 50 Mbps service with the capacity to offer much faster speeds. AT&T is building up their U-Verse service, offering data speeds of up to 25 Mbps with Internet video as well. Cable systems are starting to deploy the next generation of Internet technology called Docsis 3.0, offering speeds of 50 Mbps (compared to a maximum of about 16 Mbps available with today’s cable systems) and eventually much more.