Japan and South Korea Overshadow U.S. Web Connections

August 26, 2008 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events 

Virginia’s Internet Speed Climbs to Top in U.S.

Virginia is ranked fourth in U.S. in real-time Internet connection speeds, as shown by a state-by-state report released this month, dnronline.com reports.

The commonwealth posted a median download speed of 5 megabits per second, as said by the national report, titled “The Speed Test.”

Although that may look impressing if we were to compare it to the rest of the nation, put it next to other countries, such Japan and South Korea and its magnitude fades. Let’s throw in some figures – the Japanese are blessed with astounding download speeds of 63.6 mbps, while the South Koreans can download at the speed of 49 mbps.

Rhode Island managed to top the U.S. list for the second year consecutively at 6.8 mbps, while those living in Alaska have to wait the longest to complete their downloads at 0.8 mbps.

“The same file that takes 30 seconds to download in Rhode Island would take more than four minutes if you’re logged in from Alaska,” the report specifies.

This survey, a project of the Communications Workers of America, is based on data collected from approximately 230,000 Internet users who took the online “Speed Matters Speed Test” which measures the “last-mile speed” of an Internet connection. This is done by sending out a request to the nearest server and measuring the time until a response is delivered.

To wrap it up – the national median download speed in the United States reaches 2.3 mbps. However, Japan and South Korea are the only countries to make U.S. connection speeds look ridicule – Finland and France, the first with (21.7 mbps) and the latter with (17 mbps), do that easily enough as well.

The report added that the purpose of the test was to emphasize the issue of Internet connectivity.

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