We talk about bottlenecks in high-end, performance-centric gaming and development rigs all the time: the HDD vs. SSD chokepoint, AMD vs. NVIDIA graphics chips, and CPU disparities in our gaming build guides. One thing we often don't mention, though, is Internet speed -- and it makes perfect sense to talk about: Gaming is centered around performance, and even if you build one of our monstrous dev setups, none of that will matter in a multiplayer or team environment if pinched throughput or throttled speeds are at play.
Pando Networks, an analytical network performance and benchmarking firm -- funded in part by Intel -- recently released a study including the fastest and slowest average 'download speeds' in the US for 2011, getting down to city granularities. Here's a map we've created with the top fastest cities in the US for average download rates; it's important to state that these are only averages, which don't accurately reflect overall fastest and slowest speeds. If you have an evil ISP, as many of us do, you may see slower speeds than those listed. Similarly, those with particularly effective or forward-thinking ISPs may see faster rates.
Many ISPs measure in Mb, or megabits (or falsely label them as MB), but the units are easily converted: 1Mb (megabit) = 128 KB (kilobytes).
For ease of reading, we've given the full listing of cities its own page in this post -- continue to page 2 for the list of many more cities.
While we don't have the full study in our hands quite yet, we do know a little bit about the testing procedures (though methodologies remain unreleased): Pando tested "download speeds" in the USA's largest cities -- defined as those with populations of 500,000 or greater -- and otherwise locations that are considered technological hotspots (Austin, Seattle, and Chandler come to mind).
For cities, we see that Austin, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and New York rank in the top -- somewhat unsurprisingly, while El Paso, TX recorded one of the worst speed outputs, clocking in at 483KB/s.
States saw similar performance, with the East coast dominating the board: RI, DE, NJ, MA, and MD were all 850KB/s or greater, counterweighted by ID, OK, MT, KY, WY, and several others in the sub-500KB/s spectrum.
I see that many of you are based in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Charlotte, each pegged at 665KB/s, 828KB/s, 841KB/s, and 560KB/s, respectively. Remember, these are average speeds; that means you may have lower, higher, or, well, the average. The best news is that you probably have options available in the faster locations -- some of us are limited to a single, throttling, slow option -- others, myself included, aren't even ranked. That explains a lot.
The study concluded that Comcast pulled ahead in the battle for fastest American ISP, proudly offering an average speed of 941KB/s (or 7.35 Mbits/s); Optimum Online ranked second at an average rate of 874KB/s down. Pulling up the rear, Cox gained an honorable mention for 800KB/s, Verizon at 799KB/s, and TWC's notoriously unreliable Road Runner service was marked at 737KB/s down.
As fiber optics become increasingly more popular and cities locate the funds to pressure its installation, we can only hope for ever-faster speeds and increased bandwidth. Here's to the future!
(Continue to Page 2 for the by-city and by-state results)
-Steve
