Report Says US Lags Behind Europe And Asia In Terms Of Broadband Connection Speeds

According to a report released by the Federal Communications Commission on Friday, the US still lags behind many other countries in terms of adoption and speeds of its broadband internet connections. The country attained the ninth rank among the 29 countries which were included in the survey based on the broadband data gathered from the member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The data compared the countries in terms of mobile broadband adaptation on a per capita basis and 12 out of 33 countries on the basis of the percentage of households which have fixed broadband connections.

The 63% broadband adoption rate of the United States was surpassed by countries such as South Korea, The United Kingdom and Iceland. It is currently one of the priorities of FCC to extend affordable internet access to the all of the population of America. The agency’s National Broadband Plan was released by it last year, which provided a blueprint for the expansion of internet coverage, giving the mobile services more airwaves to provide their services and upgrading the internet speeds of the country to a level up to 25 times higher than the current speeds.

The report said that consumers from the larger European and Asian cities reported higher internet speeds than similar people in the US. For an example, New York, with a population of 8.4 million, had an average download speed of 11.7 Mbps which was quite slow compared to the 35.8 Mbps speed provided in the South Korean city of Seoul which has a population of 10 million. However, it was accepted by the agency that the variation and gaps in the data collection methods across the different countries prevented these conclusions from being totally reliable. Hence, the report detailed the efforts by the FCC, along with the State Department and Commerce Department to work on making a more reliable report.