The FCC won’t let me be or let me be me released a study yesterday that outlines some data it has collected, including the actual, for realsies Internet speeds that people get based on provider. The chart you see above provides the most summarized data showing how respective Internet providers live up to (or fail to live up to) their advertised speeds. FIOS is tops, consistently over-performing expectations, while it appears that several others don’t ever meet their advertised speeds and can drop to as low as nearly 50%.
The study notes that “actual download speeds are substantially closer to advertised speeds than was found in data from early 2009,” which is a bit of a double-edged comment. Things are getting better, but we’re still mainly seeing ISPs move closer to advertised speeds.
The data was collected by a company called SamKnows, that has experience with this kind of measurement from work in the UK. SamKnows picked out 78,000 Internet users, set 9,000 up with special routers and collected data over the month of March 2011. It’s interesting to finally see this data in the real world from a source we can trust. I, for one, am beginning to believe the FIOS hype and that beautifully straight little line sure helps. Check out a few more graphs from the study below.
(via Ars Technica)
