The Slowest Draw in the West

Once upon a time, America had the fastest Internet in the world. But today, according to our new report, American cities are trailing with vastly slower -- and costlier -- Internet speeds: average speeds around the world are increasing as America falls behind, and the price per megabit (aka the cost of bandwidth) is much higher in the U.S. than in most other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

To put it simply: prices are high, speeds are slower, and there doesn’t seem to be much that consumers can do about it. The Open Technology Institute’s new data gathers the cost of high-speed Internet from 24 cities around the world. What distinguishes our data from many of the other rankings out there is that we focus on the cost of connectivity in big cities -- a way to account for the difficulty of comparing the United States as a whole when it is much larger and more sparsely populated than many countries in Europe or Asia. We present the actual broadband packages that a consumer in New York, Seoul, or Paris might consider subscribing to at home. And we found that in general, American consumers pay higher prices for lower speeds than their international peers.