Speed Matters

Just released by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a new report and interactive assessment of internet speed.

The report, Speed Matters, purports to show our competitive upload and download internet speeds, mostly as a vehicle demonstrating our competitive position vis-a-vis the rest of the world. That comparison is taken from published sources for the rest of the world, but the U.S. is from a real-time speed test of 80,000 internet broadband users.

You can utilize available maps to get color-coded internet speeds for states, counties and sub-county areas. Try it. Surprising are the speeds given for Tacoma and Pierce County areas, given our competitive broadband environment. However, my test from downtown Tacoma, gave MUCH higher speeds than that for most U.S. states and all but the leading nations.

My test from home (west Tacoma) gave even higher upload and download speeds.

The CWA is supporting a Senate bill, the Broadband Data Improvement Act (S.1492) to raise the definition of broadband (now at 200 kbps - just faster than dial-up) and calls for federal collection of deployment data with grants to states and communities for high-speed mapping.