US ISPs may be slow, but at least they're honest

The cable industry is cheering new data suggesting that most Americans receive something close to the broadband speeds advertised by their Internet service providers.

The Ookla broadband testing service's report compares "promised" versus "actual" broadband speeds around the world and concludes that Americans get 92.91 percent of their advertised throughput rate. "That sounds like pretty good news," the National Cable and Telecommunications Association's Cable Tech Talk blog notes. "Networks are performing by and large as they should and, as a result, consumers are happy." The global advertised versus actual ratio is 87.01 percent, according to Ookla, with the United States coming in eleventh among nations. When it comes to actual broadband speeds, Ookla ranks the US pretty low. We come in at number 30 on the download speed index, with a "rolling mean" (average over the last 30 days) of 10.13 Mbps... just below Russia, Slovakia, and Lichtenstein.