Good news for millions of users who are consuming vast amounts of media on the internet in the United States: speeds are getting faster, especially in cities like Kansas City, Austin, Phoenix, Seattle and San Francisco.
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This improvement is more than a 40% increase since July 2015, according to data from Speedtest.
Internet download and upload speeds got faster across the USA during the first six months of the year, the study said, as more providers invest in their networks and build out fiber broadband to more customers.
The SpeedTest mobile network rankings, based on the average LTE download performance, ranks Verizon Wireless with 21.11/8.22 Mbps as offering the fastest service, followed by T-Mobile with 21.02/11.59 Mbps, AT&T with 18.91/6.77 Mbps and Sprint with 15.04/4.7 Mbps.
Ookla says that average download speeds among the largest broadband ISPs are up a whopping 42% in the first half of the year, pushing the average download speed over the 50 mbps threshold for the first time ever.
While Verizon’s Fios falls squarely in the middle of the ranking for average download speeds, unlike rival services Fios puts a special emphasis on creating symmetric links, to make the upload just as fast as the download speed. Overall, the fixed broadband industry has seen consolidation, speed upgrades and growth in fiber optic deployments.
“If you’re an optimist, you’ll see an annual 40% increase in fixed broadband performance and a 30% increase in mobile internet performance as a big step in the right direction”, says Speedtest.
It’s good stuff, but don’t lose track of the fact that our speeds still lag behind many other countries, and many companies exert ongoing strangleholds on cities or neighborhoods. For mobile, the average download speed was 23.34 mbps and upload was 10.47 mbps. Carriers are aggressively focusing on network capacity to combat the insatiable data usage of USA mobile consumers; people are using mobile internet more and more.
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Ookla’s latest Speedtest report suggests that the average US Internet connection has surpassed 50 Mbps for the first time, though the findings clash starkly with other, similar reports.
