Moving soon? Well check out the slideshow after the jump so you don’t move to a state with dial-up speeds.
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Akamai Technologies, an Internet content delivery network, has released their latest “State Of The Internet” report for the second quarter of 2011. The report looks at the average internet speeds of cities, states and countries around the world.
The data is collected from the approximately 1 trillion requests made to Akamai’s global server network per day. Any country where more than 25,000 different IP addresses made requests in the second quarter were included in the analysis.
The United States was found to be in 12th place globally, with an average connection speed of 5.8 Mbps — much better than the global average of 2.6 MBps, but less than half as fast as the South Korea which boasts an average speed of 13.8 MBps.
One possible reason that the U.S. has relatively slow internet as compared with other developed nations is because the governments in some countries, such as Japan, require broadband companies to use the newest internet technology to guarantee the best service. The U.S., by contrast, “generally relie[s] on the marketplace to determine the cost and quality of broadband,” MacWorld reports.
In terms of the fastest American states, there was some noticeable reshuffling from Akamai’s first quarter rankings. According to Akamai, “for the first time in recent memory” the number-one state was knocked into second place. The new leader (see slideshow) is the same one that Pando Networks, another content delivery company, found to be the speediest in a study they released back July.
While specific states varied between the two lists, Pando and Akamai were in definite agreement on the fastest region. In Pando’s study the Northeast through Mid-Atlantic region boasted 8 out of 10 of the fastest states. While Akamai’s list included 3 western states, the rest of the top finishers were on the Eastern seaboard.
But, with one exception, no matter what state you’re in, your internet speed is getting faster. Akamai reports that internet speeds in all states except West Virginia have gotten 10 percent faster since last year.
Check out our slideshow to see which states are the fastest in the union.
