Broadband performance study finds huge regional disparities in US

Pando Networks has published the results of a study evaluating the Internet download performance of 4 million users across the country. The data offers some insight into regional bandwidth trends, highlighting significant disparity between US states in the average quality of Internet connectivity.

The study found that the Northeastern states and the West Coast had the highest average Internet speed. Rural regions in the Midwest tended to have the lowest average download performance -- a finding consistent with previous reports of broadband availability challenges in rural communities. The highest-performing state was Rhode Island, with an average download speed of 894KBps. The lowest performer was Idaho with only 318KBps. The scores from Pando's tests are quite different from the results of a smaller broadband performance study conducted by Communication Workers of America (CWA) in 2007. The CWA survey identified some similar regional trends, but found uniformly higher performance across the country. Both studies point to Rhode Island as the state with the fastest average broadband speed, for example, but CWA computed average broadband speed in the state at 5MBps. Pando's tests are based on real-world downloads made by users of the company's services, so it's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the user's actual bandwidth capacity.