Broadband Speeds Only Half of Advertised Speed
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CREDIT: FCC |
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has confirmed something many people have long suspected: broadband internet connections are never as fast as the Internet Service Providers (ISP) claim they are.
But what was surprising was just how slow they really are. The FCC, using data from comScore and Akamai, confirmed that most users aren't even getting close to the speeds that ISPs are advertising . According to the results, the average subscriber is getting speeds between 3-4 megabits per second. But the average advertised speed from ISPs is 7 megabits per second.
"Therefore actual download speeds experienced by U.S. consumers appear to lag advertised speeds by roughly 50 percent," said the FCC report.
The FCC is doing a follow-up study with its own data in order to get an even more accurate measure of how much customers are being bamboozled .
In the meantime, the FCC already states that advertised broadband speeds are already so inaccurate that something must be done. The FCC supports a label proposed by The National Broadband Plan that will give broadband customers accurate information about just what kind of speeds they can expect.
