Last year, the folks at Speed Maters have recently the “first-ever state-by-state report on Internet connection speed.” (We blogged about that last year.) They just released the latest version. In short, they ask folks across the country to test and report their connection speeds.
Here are the Minnesota stats we pulled last year:
The median download speed in Minnesota was 1.77 (mbps)
The median download speed in Minnesota was .36 (mbps)
Compared with the numbers from this year:
Number of tests done from MN: 2,650
The median download speed in Minnesota was 1.566 (mbps)
The median upload speed in Minnesota was .512 (mbps)
So our download speed is actually slower! That’s not a good sign. We’ve slipped from 26 state ranking to 40. I could feel better about that if other states were picking up their game – but we’re just losing ground.
For the countrywide perspective, I’ll quote from Speed Matters directly:
The Speed Test, which measures the last-mile speed of your Internet connection, shows that the 2008 median real-time download speed in the U.S. is a mere 2.3 megabits per second (mbps). This represents a gain of only 0.4 mbps over last year’s median download speed. It compares to an average download speed in Japan of 63 mbps. At this rate of progress, it will take the U.S. more than 100 years to catch up with current Internet speeds in Japan. This is unacceptable for the country that invented the Internet.
