Comcast and South Korean Broadband Subscribers: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Foster Kamer — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:00:53 -0400

In New York City, our broadband internet choices are a little limited: most are stuck with Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner subsidary, or Verizon FIOS, which—for many people—the jury's still out on. And while we probably have the same complaints as anybody else who recieves broadband internet (sometimes, it's slow; sometimes, it breaks; it's stupid-expensive; etc...) we now surely have unilateral validation for at least one of these complaints: Ours simply is not the best.

That distinguishment apparently belongs to Comcast. They are Comcastic.

Om Malik at GigaOm takes note of a Multichannel News report that Ookla, a company in the business of testing broadband speeds, has crowned Comcast as the fastest of the group. Some upgrade that has something to do with some "DOCSIS 3.0 technology," or something.

Either way, marvel with jealousy:

Comcast and Charter delivered average download speeds of 17.19 Megabits per second, followed by Cablevision at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at 15.76 Mbps, TWC at 14.41 Mbps and Insight at 14.22 Mbps. Verizon Communications fared better than its telco peers with an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps, thanks to FiOS Internet, its fiber-to-the-home service that provides up to 150 Mbps downstream. And overall, Verizon had the highest upstream speeds with an average of 7.41 Mbps. Still, the company’s legacy DSL services dragged down overall speeds.

Of course, before Malik notes his broadband as faster than yours, he's careful to relay the depressingly American fact that our cable internet isn't exactly going to win us the Space Race of Cable or whatever anytime soon.

As an observation, these top speeds from cable companies are much slower than the top speeds in other countries such as South Korea, Japan, the Baltic nations and parts of Eastern Europe.

So, if you live in South Korea, Japan, the Baltics, or one of the sketchy Eastern European countries where rich guys from America do terrible things that are then depicted in Eli Roth movies, your internet is faster than most of ours, congratulations, we hate you. And if you get Comcast, your internet is faster than the rest of America's.

Well done.

Surely you're putting it to good use.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Betabeat » Comcast and South Korean Broadband Subscribers: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Comcast and South Korean Broadband Subscribers: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger