Sometimes a story seems too good to be true. According to the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai Technologies, Berkeley has the fastest average Internet speeds in the world.
In most surveys of Internet speed, the U.S. fares badly compared to South Korea or Sweden. But when Akamai focused in on individual cities the top three cities in the world were Berkeley (18.7 megabits per second), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (17.5Mbps) and — ha! — Stanford (17.0Mbps).
Of course, you and I get speeds more like 6Mbps (as in the test I just did, right). Berkeley’s average soars because of the university and Berkeley Lab, just as Chapel Hill benefits from the University of North Carolina and Stanford benefits from its university.
Still, if the city is looking to top global league tables, Akamai’s is a good one to top. It’s nice to be number one.
If you want to read the complete Akamai report, you can download it here.
If ESnet (http://www.es.net/) is included in the Berkeley stats, it’s not surprising this is the result.
I reliably get 25Mbps down and 2Mbps up on my Sonic.net Bonded Fusion connection at my home office near Ashby BART. The slowest point is usually on the other end, at least when I’m downloading.
I get around 20Mbps regularly, both at business and at home.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/788847070.png