A post found today in Mashable, a blog focusing on social technology, reports that the Internet in the US is showing signs of slowing down, as measured by Aramaic, the global content provider. The performance in Q3 was bad enough to displace the US from the 10 top countries with fastest Internet access in the world. In fact, the US ranked 18th among 203 countries where Akamai measures Internet performance.
The report cites a global average speed of 1.7 MBPS with South Korea retaining the leadership position. As I mention in a previous post, the South Korean government is subsidizing deployment of fast speed internet in their quest to integrate the population from rural areas into their workforce. In the US, the reported average is 3.9 MBPS, declining from a year ago, with some exceptions, like Utah, Massachusetts or District of Columbia, all of those places showing a remarkable 15% increase from last year.
This report must help dispel the myth that Internet access is universally equal and unpredictable; in fact, it is quite simple to measure Internet access behavior patterns for individual locations or regions (associated with an Internet POP) and incorporate the methodology into the Performance Testing procedures. Shunra provide the tools to measure the performance (VE Catcher) and to model the site locations by using VE Suite.
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