US’s top ISPs largely deliver the advertised download speeds, while DSL connections fail to meet up the promised speeds, claims a new report.
Federal Communications Commission has published the Measuring Broadband America report for the year which reveals that major internet service providers deliver the speeds they promise with a few of them delivering even higher speeds.
The FCC ran a series of exhaustive tests which revealed that the notion that ISPs deliver suboptimal performances is actually because of network congestion.
FCC recruited almost 10,000 volunteers across the nation who installed “off-the-shelf” routers which were paired with special monitoring software to measure speeds at different times and intervals.
When the statistics gathered by the routers were tapped, it was apparent that the speeds were affected at the interchange points, which is the point at which the internet traffic joins or leaves the ISP’s network. For instance, the speeds are impacted when content pertaining to your request is loaded to your network, which is a new discovery that the companies are yet to tackle.
Getting further into the details of the report, Verizon FiOS, Comcast and Cablevision consistently delivered 120 percent of the speeds they promised while the others deliver speeds equal to the promised speeds. ISPs who use fibre optic cable in their service were able to deliver the promised speeds.
On the other hand, only 64 percent of the DSL subscribers received a satisfactory service and surprisingly, Verizon which scored the best for the broadband performance loses out to the others when it comes to DSL, becoming the ISP offering the worst DSL service of all.
FCC has not revealed who took part in the study or the exact places where the test was conducted. Other revelations of the study included that the average download speed for all the test sites was 20.2Mbps. Notably, this number is increasing every year as the number of users is increasing.
