[1st-mile-nm] National Broadband Statistics (We're doing OK ?)

[Richard Lowenberg]

According to yesterday's PR from the White House,
"98 percent of Americans nationwide are now connected to high-speed wireless Internet".
I wonder if the word should be "have access to" rather than are now connected to".

And from Broadband Reports, "US connection speed has jumped 10 Mbps in the last year to 33.9 Mbps. 
That said, the US improvements were only enough to push it to 27th among the 199 countries ranked by average downstream speed."

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/US-Now-27th-Globally-With-Average-Speed-of-339-Mbps-133097

Data sets are available at:
http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States/ 

While NM is still ranked near the bottom of the list of States,
I have deep concern about these recent statistics, which do not seem to jive with 'ground truth'.
While Comcast service has raised the bandwidth bar in NM and across the country,
they do not serve most of the State and where they do offer some significant bandwidth, 
that bandwidth drops rapidly as service moves out to the periphery of their connected areas.
That is the case for all the providers, though technical details vary.   

It would be very useful to have a state conduct a more accurate broadband survey,
though access to the real needed data is a problem.

RL


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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Director
1st-Mile Institute          www.1st-mile.org  
P. O.  Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM    87504
505-603-5200                 rl at 1st-mile.org
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