The United States’ average wireless and wired network performance both grew over the past 12 months, but continue to lag…
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Ookla has released its annual Speedtest.net report on wireless and wireline internet speeds in the United States, and the various carrier-specific and regional variations between different parts of the US itself. The average performance across the US had jumped dramatically in past years, but the last 12 months saw smaller gains.
Average download speeds for wired service grew 1.17x over the past 12 months, to 64.17Mbps from 54.97Mbps. Wired upload speeds grew to 22.79Mbps compared with 18.97Mbps a year ago, a jump of 1.20x.
Nationwide, XFinity takes the cake for fastest speeds overall (69.58Mbps) with CenturyLink the slowest by a significant margin (14.31Mbps) . It isn’ t clear why CenturyLink lags so far behind all other companies; the company is the third largest telecom provider in the US behind AT&T and Verizon.
Ookla notes just 51.8 percent of CenturyLink subscribers have access to a fixed broadband speed of at least 10Mbps, while 91.6 percent of XFinity customers can say the same. Ookla also found significant variation in performance depending on which region of the country you live in, though the breakdown isn’ t necessarily what you’ d expect:
The northeast, as a whole, lags well behind the rest of the country when it comes to average speeds. This is surprising on the one hand, since there are several large population centers in the northeast, and cities are generally thought to be synonymous with high wireline performance. It’s possible, however, that the rural areas of many of the small northeast states are underserved, lowering their overall ratings.
US wireless performance grew much less from 2016-2017 than it did from 2015-2016, rising 1.19x to 22.69Mbps compared with 1.33x the year before. The US also ranks much lower in the world when it comes to wireless performance. We’ re 15th in wireline download speeds, but 44th in wireless, just ahead of Oman. Average upload speed grew by 1.04x, to 8Mbps. We’ re 65th for upload speed overall, just behind Mongolia and ahead of Germany.
Rural areas in the US see slower overall performance, with an average download speed of 17.93Mbps. Averages are almost certainly not the best way to categorize this data, however. Having lived in multiple rural areas over the past six years, and with family that lives in several more, I can’ t think of a single time I enjoyed service remotely in the vicinity of 18Mbps while residing (temporarily or otherwise) in a county where the cows outnumber the people. Cell service tends to be good in an extremely narrow band alongside interstates and major thoroughfares, and a complete crapshoot otherwise. I’ ve lived in parts of New York State that were still EDGE-only at the end of 2014.
It’s also much more common to run into conditions where multiple carriers might be technically available, but only one is actually capable of providing a decent internet connection, and these conditions aren’ t changing quickly. When my parents moved to their current home in 2007, cellular service was erratic and untrustworthy. Ten years later, their cellular service is… erratic and untrustworthy (as is mine, when I visit) .
Ookla does discuss some of this, but it suggests the gap between acceptable performance in a city versus an urban area is just 7 percent (meaning a rural user is 7 percent less likely to see unacceptable cell performance) . That may be true on average across the entire country, but local situations can be considerably worse.
Moving on from the rural question, T-Mobile won top accolades for its network performance compared with Verizon Wireless and AT&T. T-Mobile has generally won accolades for its network improvements and expansions in recent years, courtesy of its 700MHz spectrum blocks. Verizon and AT&T aren’ t too far back, and Sprint, well… Sprint exists. We’ re glad it does, of course — not only do we favor increased competition here at ET, but Sprint clearly occupies a unique position in the market, competing as it does with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile on the one hand (for voice service) and with the US Postal Service (for prompt packet package delivery) on the other. (For more on wireless network speeds, read our sister site PCMag’s Fastest Mobile Networks 2017.)
Overall, both wired and wireless speeds have improved over the past year, but there’s a long way for the US to go if we want to catch the other OECD countries. The geographic size of the US means rural areas will never completely close the gap. But it would be nice to see performance in these markets (both wired and wireless) improve in the not-too-distant future.
You can read the full Ookla Speedtest.net market report for more details; it includes tables that lets you see localized test results for individual cities and states.
Also read from PCMag.com: Verizon, AT&T May Be Choking Unlimited Data Users
Disclaimer: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, which also publishes ExtremeTech.com.
