The Communication Worker's of America recently released their Speed Matters report which provides data on broadband data speeds in each of the fifty states.

Almost all of the broadband speed debate thus far has focused on network capability. That is, a government or not for profit agency, asks a vendor to reveal the available maximum speed obtainable in a region and the tier's associated price. Recently, California challenged that this capability metric was sufficient for understanding true broadband availability.

The California Broadband report noted:
"A consumer’s broadband experience is typically based on the speed realized on a shared medium. Many broadband infrastructures are “shared”—that is, Internet traffic is aggregated at various points, depending on technology, such that multiple users typically share a connection at some point in their Internet experience. For example, one version of FTTH has 32 users sharing a single 1.2 Gbps data stream. However, broadband rate measurements (both at the national and state level) have focused on networking “capability,” with vendors reporting on the physical capacity of their network to deliver data. Therefore, the physical capability of the network may not adequately indicate the actual bandwidth experienced by the consumer. Moreover, not all consumers purchase broadband with the highest speed available. Similarly, while a service may offer up to a specific megabit per second, a customer may not routinely experience that speed. The actual performance changes as a function of the number of simultaneous users and the peak hours of usage."

One unique aspect of the CWA approach to measurement is that they are focused more on the measurement of actual achieved speed by end users, "effective speed" as opposed to conceptual network capability. They are able to calculate this speed by having end users run web based test which measure the effective network speed they are able to receive. Each of these tests is then aggregated for an area leading to an average effective speed calculation.

Using this metric CWA notes the average median download speed in the United States is currently 2.3 megabits a second, almost 30 times slower than Japan (63mbps). The US has been very slow to catch up to international bandwidth leading nations such as Japan and Korea improving only four-tenths of a megabit per second since last year. If this incremental improvement continues it would take the US nearly 100 years to catch up today's speeds in Japan.[2]

So, given the importance of broadband to the information economy and the next generation of e-care services (digital government, next generation home entertainment, medical care, etc) why does the US lag? While many rightly point to the lack of any coordinated federal policy in this regards we may also be hampered by the large size of our nation.

Chris Null did an interesting analysis of recent broadband capability data that took into account country size. He explains,

"I took a look at the 20 countries where broadband penetration is the highest (they're ranked from top to bottom in the chart above), and compared the average broadband speed (per the recent Explaining International Broadband Leadership study, page 6 [PDF]) to the geographical area of each country. I then multiplied the two numbers together to give a sense of how many Mbps are available per thousand square kilometers of sheer land that has to be covered. (Higher numbers indicate faster coverage over more land.)

bband size/speed chris null yahoo
The exercise is simplistic but the results are interesting, if expected: Smaller countries generally have faster broadband. The bigger nations, including the U.S., Australia, and Canada, lag far behind. (Canada is considerably better off than the U.S. is, with a 7.6Mbps average vs. our 4.9Mbps average, but consider how much of the country is unpopulated. And yes, I know we have Alaska, too, but still...)"

So, it appears that size does matter....and having a small landmass may make countries which make substantial investments in broadband more competitive against larger nations. Are we headed for a future in which smaller companies become the "outsourced" location not because of cheaper labor but better infrastructure?