Survey Ranks U.S. Cities Based on Average Internet Connection Speeds—And New York Doesn’t Fare Well
By Jotham Sederstrom September 13, 2013 9:00 am
reprints
Well folks, good news (but actually not): according to a recent study, there are 2,223 cities in the U.S. with faster average broadband speeds than New York.
The survey, compiled by Ookla’s Net Index (and analyzed really thoroughly by Gizmodo), ranked cities across the country based on average Internet connection speeds.
Surprisingly—with all the fuss everyone’s made about Google fiber in Kansas—it was actually the small town of Ephrata, Washington that took home the prize for the fastest Internet. Ephrata, which has its own, personal super-fast fiber network, boasts an average speed of 85.84 mbps. Nobody’s waiting for Netflix (NFLX) to load in Ephrata, let me tell you.
Okay, okay, Kansas City did come in second place. But its average speed was only 49.86 mbps (um, what happened to the Google Fiber?), which seriously makes me wonder why the heck we don’t all just pack our bags and move to Ephrata.
New York City rolled in at number 2,224, with an average speed of 18.43 mbps. No, it’s not amazingly impressive, especially when you consider that New York is prepping itself to become the nation’s next tech hub. But hey, 18.43 mbps is still higher than the national average of 18.2 mbps, so there you go.
Still not satisfied? Don’t worry—according to Gizmodo, the survey might not be the most reliable. Ookla gathered its data through speedtest.net, a site that lets users easily measure their Internet speeds. As a result, the survey is self-selecting; data only comes from users who’d think to use speedtest.net in the first place.
And hey, at least you don’t live in Chinle, Arizona (Sorry, folks of Chinle.) With an average Internet speed of 0.84 mbps, Chinle clocked in at last place, ranked number 5,690.
