In what has become a familiar refrain, the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai shows the US trailing in a number of metrics, including average connection speeds and broadband penetration.
As the FCC is set to announce the first official national broadband policy in March, the study underscores the need for that policy to encourage expansion of high-speed networking infrastructure (which it appears poised to do) as well as drive the necessary competition to make broadband connections more affordable (which it won’t apparently address in much detail).
Akamai bases its statistics on data gathered from its network of 56,000 servers spread around the world, part of its optimized media delivery system. This gives Akamai an extremely large data set to mine for information like the number of unique IP addresses accessing its services and their connection speeds. Sifting through this data and linking IP addresses to specific locations allows for some fairly detailed analysis.
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]