The FCC Broadband Test is now officially live, with all forms of broadband being subjected to download and upload torture tests. Loyal High Speed Expert readers will probably note that broadband performance tests of all kinds are potentially flawed, but that does not necessarily make such tests irrelevant. Instead, it just means that the results of such tests need to be taken with a grain of salt. What are these results of the FCC’s broadband test thus far? Well, before we give that information out it would only be pertinent to discuss the test itself.
The FCC Benchmark
In recent years the state of US broadband has sorely lagged behind the rest of the world. While other countries caught up to, and some even surpassed, the United States in terms of penetration and performance. This puts the residents and small businesses in the United States at a decided disadvantage on the global economic playing field. As new bandwidth intensive technologies are developed and deployed, the United States could be left in the dust.
This is the primary reason why the FCC has been working hard on finding new ways to encourage providers to meet the 100/100 by 2020 standard. This standard calls for 100 million households and businesses to have access to 100 Mbps of downstream performance by the year 2020. While this goal might seem amazing, especially to those lingering with 1 Mbps or slower speeds, there are already plenty of countries with faster services available. In fact, the Google Gigabit Broadband service that has everyone in an uproar is not even the world’s first 1 Gbps fiber connection…other countries already have that, and a stunning number of cities and countries around the world already have access to 100 Mbps downstream broadband services as well.
To Know Where You Are Going, You Have to Know Where You’ve Been
The old expression states that one can only know where they are going if they know where they have been. With that in mind, the FCC decided to release a broadband bandwidth test to see where the nation is now in relation to its 100/100 by 2020 standard. With over 150,000 participants offering up data, and more than a few peeved ISPs with overloaded networks, the answer seems to be in dispute. Some data suggests that average downstream speeds are somewhere between 7 and 11.5 Mbps while upstream speeds are a far more pedestrian 2 to 2.7 Mbps depending on where one gets their data.
Many Numbers
Anytime a government-related test is quoted and multiple numbers are given, it is easy to cry foul. The Download speed test powered by Ookla net metrics platform seems to produce higher numbers than those produced by the M-Lab platform, which may be a regional consideration. For example, some of the largest cities in the U.S. are serviced by ultra-high speed networks such as AT&T’s U-verse and Verizon’s FiOS service. Both of these services are significantly faster than those offered in less populated regions such as Tucson, where 50 Mbps downstream speeds are only wishful thinking at this point despite not being far from population-dense California and Phoenix.
Further skewing the numbers may be the number of participants in different states. For example, California has very fast broadband services while its neighbor, Arizona, does not. California also has a simply staggering population compared to Arizona, and would seem to be more likely to have a larger number of computer users than Arizona would. As a result, California’s results may actually be skewing the test results and the average download and upload speeds available to consumers on a per capita basis may be substantially less than what is reflected in these early test figures. Minnesota and Georgia are another pair of states where only a tiny fraction of the population even bothered to take the broadband test.
The Bottom Line
The FTC broadband test is not necessarily a telling indicator at this point, but even the best case situations still show just how far the broadband services in the U.S. will need to go in the next few years in order to hit the 100/100 by 2020 goal of the FCC’s. Hopefully Google’s Gigabit Broadband service will also stir up enough interest to cause consumers to look into excellent broadband services such as the aforementioned FiOS network, and demand that those services be made more widely available as they continue to expand in performance. In short, it would seem to be a great time to be a broadband loving consumer.
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