What Matters More Than National Average Broadband Speed

The USA may be the king of gadgets. But compared to countries like Japan and Korea, the country’s average broadband speed is a bit lacking.

But then, you probably know this. After all, this was well-discussed last year. The real question is: does the US really need a high average broadband speed?

In the first place, you’ve got people like Christopher Null arguing that boosting the US’ broadband capacity is currently an impracticality:

Is it really that bad? Sure, I’d love to have the 60-plus megabits per second that the average Japanese broadband subscriber has access to, but the logistics of offering such a service on a national scale in a country as large as the U.S. are nightmarish. The U.S. is 25 times larger in area than Japan, and 96 times larger than South Korea, the other big broadband high-flyer.

Impracticalities aside, the figure for the US this year, 4.9 Mbps, isn’t shabby at all. That translates to around 600 kb/s, or 0.6 megabytes a second. That equals 20 minutes to download the entire contents of a 700MB CD. So other countries do it faster. Again, so?

What’s more important than speed are:

• Reliability. What’s the point of being fast, when you can’t that expect that speed to be available for 99% of the time?
• Upload speeds. So far, “speed” meant how fast people can download content. While that’s important to the success of the web, another crucial aspect is how people can quickly share content with each other. Upload speeds play a huge role in this.

So while the comparatively low broadband speeds of the US have attracted criticism, it doesn’t necessarily represent the US getting left behind in the online world.