I'm In the 1% of Internet Users Within the US

I recently ran an Internet speed test, the results came back and reaffirmed that I am in fact receiving the speeds I’m paying for with my Verizon FiOS connection. I pay for 75Mbps download and 35Mbps upload and as you can see from the image below, that’s essentially what I’m getting.

This is good news. However, I also noticed that my speeds put me in the 1% of Internet users within the US. You can see for yourself right under the Ping of 15ms, there is text that reads “Faster than 99% of US.” At first, that seems awesome, but then, when you realize that most people in the US have much inferior Internet connections it’s upsetting.

We need to work towards having ISP’s provide some kind of standard “acceptable” broadband Internet connection. For arguments sake, let’s say the standard was set to 15Mbps download and 3Mbps upload. This standard would be the minimum speed that an ISP could offer to its customers. Not only is this a standard I’m fairly confident could be implemented by most ISP’s, especially those in urban/suburban areas, it’s a standard that would allow most people to continue to take full advantage of the growing number of web services being offered.

When I see certain ISP’s only offering 1Mbps upload or less — it’s upsetting, because these days, upload is becoming just as important as download. It used to be people only cared about download speeds, that isn’t the case anymore. In fact, the more we move towards the cloud and web services, the more important our Internet connection becomes (both download and upload).

If you think I’m just spewing nonsense here, why do you think Google setup its own fiber initiative to provide affordable 1Gbps fiber Internet to a select location? One reason is to show it could be done, the other reasons include because Google knows in order for it to continue its success, people need access to fast Internet so they can continue to have good experiences with their services. For example, people with slow Internet using services such as Google Drive, which really requires a good upload speed, if you’re uploading a lot of data, will have bad experiences and just not use the product.

We can do so much better for people in the US when it comes to Internet speeds. So I have to ask, why aren’t we moving more quickly to improve them nation wide?