Want Fast Broadband? Move to Utah

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Though New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago are often thought of as
fast-moving cities, none of them are among the top ten fastest cities in
America when it comes to broadband.

Instead, if you want to live in the city with the fastest average
broadband connection speed, you’ll have to move to the state of Utah.

The latest quarterly State of the Internet Report from content delivery
giant Akamai puts Sandy, Utah, at the top of the list for U.S. cities with
the fastest average broadband speeds, with an average connection speed of
33,464 Kbps (33.5 Mbps).

Coming in second place in Akamai’s third-quarter 2009 report: Iowa City,
Iowa, at 27.4 Mbps; followed by Norman, Oklahoma, in third with 26.8 Mbps.
Utah also claimed two more spots in the top-ten list, at No. 4 with the city
of Logan and its 23.6 Mbps speed; and with Spanish Fork, Utah, in seventh
place at approximately 18 Mbps.

Breaking down U.S. cities by their average broadband speeds is a first
for Akamai, which has been producing its quarterly State of the Internet
since the beginning of 2008. Akamai’s data comes from its global network of
content delivery servers.

Ever since its first report, Akamai has been detailing only
which U.S. states had the highest average broadband connection speeds. For
the past year, the top U.S. state has remained the tiny state of Delaware.
For the third quarter of 2009, the average connection speed in Delaware was
7.2 Mbps, which was actually a 1.3 percent decline over the third quarter of
2008.

Overall in the U.S., the average broadband connection speed in the third
quarter of 2009 came in at 3.9 Mbps, down by 2.4 percent on a year-over-year
basis.

The reported noted that the average mobile connection speeds were between
700 Kbps to 800 Kbps in the United States, which could have brought down the
average when aggregated with higher-speed wired connections.

“The overall year-over-year decline in the U.S. average connection speed
was relatively minor,” David Belson, director of market intelligence at
Akamai Technologies, told InternetNews.com. “The larger
year-over-year sample base may have contributed to the decline, especially
as mobile usage grows.”

On a global basis during the third quarter of 2009, Akamai saw 444
million unique IP addresses from 226 countries, which represented a 17
percent increase in addresses compared to a year earlier. The increase comes
during a year in which most the world was gripped in an economic recession.

“Overall, we think that the growth in Internet usage (as represented by
an increasing number of Unique IPs connecting to Akamai) is trending in the
right direction, as we would have expected,” Belson said. “It is not clear
overall what impact the global recession has had — while there were some
published reports of broadband consumers switching to lower-speed
subscriptions, that action, as well as other factors may have contributed to
the fluctuations in average connection speeds and overall broadband
penetration.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of
Internet.com, the network for
technology professionals.