The Top 10 Cities With the Best Broadband

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:00:56 +0000

The company behind the broadband speed testing site Speedtest.net is ready to go beyond testing broadband quality and into the data game. Seattle-based Ookla has introduced a broadband index that tabulates results from the more than 1 million speed tests done each day around the world. It’s found that the average global broadband speed is 7.69 Mbps while the U.S. speeds average out at 10.12 Mbps.

Mike Apgar, co-founder and managing partner of three-year-old Ookla, said the indexes will measure broadband speeds, ping times and jitter. His goal is to move the testing beyond the tech-savvy market (we use it!), so as to get a better sense of how broadband speeds really play out across the world. The FCC is encouraging consumers to use the sites (Ookla also runs a site that tests jitter and packet loss at pingtest.net) as part of its nationwide testing goals, and many of Ookla’s ISP customers also offer the test to their customers and host Ookla’s servers.

Providing tests for ISPs is actually most of Ookla’s business. The next plank of the business strategy is the index data: Ookla hopes to provide the information for free to academic researchers, but it also plans to charge ISPs, analysts and governments for it. Ookla has no debt or venture capital, and is profitable.

The company also today released a list of the top worldwide and U.S. cities based on their broadband speeds. It measured only cities with more than 75,000 people connecting for more than three months using a 30-day rolling average. The results are subject to change, and given that no place in the U.S. ranks in the global Top 10 (the first U.S. city is San Jose, which is ranked 18), I hope the results do shift.

Here are the top 10 U.S. cities and their corresponding 30-day average speeds:

San Jose, Calif. 15.02 Mbps
Saint Paul, Minn. 14.53 Mbps
Pittsburgh, Pa. 14.18 Mbps
Oklahoma City, Okla. 12.12 Mbps
Brooklyn, N.Y. 12.10 Mbps
Tampa, Fla. 12.05 Mbps
Bronx, N.Y. 12.01 Mbps
New York, N.Y. 11.85 Mbps
Denver, Colo. 11.68 Mbps
Sacramento, Calif. 11.34 Mbps

The global top 10:

Seoul, South Korea 34.49 Mbps
Riga, Latvia 27.88 Mbps
Hamburg, Germany 26.85 Mbps
Chisinau, Republic of Moldova 24.31 Mbps
Helsinki, Finland 20.58 Mbps Mbps
Stockholm, Sweden 19.97 Mbps
Bucharest, Romania 19.68 Mbps
Sofia, Bulgaria 18.99 Mbps
Kharkov, Ukraine 18.15 Mbps
Kaunas, Lithuania 17.46 Mbps

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d): Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns

GigaOM » speedtest.net

The Top 10 Cities With the Best Broadband