I have challenged you about this topic several times and backed it up.
I still think the best public data is the FCC international broadband survey and report which I have previously referenced. The Ookla "promise" figures can be used to validate the advertised speeds in that dataset versus actual speeds.
The issue is not merely of availability of very high speed (>25mbps) connections but its price, an area in which the FCC study demonstrates the US is not competitive. [This information cannot be obtained from the data sets you mentioned].
Moreover, most people, certainly most people here, don't care about nation-wide or even state-wide averages, and they distort the figures, in favor of the US no less (rural Wyoming probably has better access than rural Romania, nobody cares about either). What are the figures for the main urban centers? As a datapoint, based on the FCC data I don't think there is a major US city which is competitive with Warsaw, Poland except possibly for Austin due to Google Fiber.
What would help settle this issue is if someone like Netflix , Google or Dropbox incorporated a speed test (they don't seem to test beyond their stream rates currently) and made the granular data public.
Finally, it is anecdotal but I have found those who have lived in Scandinavia (or Eastern Europe) and the US say pretty consistently that the broadband is much worse in the latter.
> As I said before, I don't find the FCC survey compelling, because it's not based on measured speeds like Ookla's or Akamai's data.
Again, Akamai and Ookla don't incorporate usable price information and use averages that distort the data. The weakness of the FCC data is mitigated by the fact that you can look at Ookla data to see that the region in question is getting advertised speeds, at least in aggregate.
> Why would we expect the U.S. to be competitive on that front?
The issue is whether the US has better broadband. Price is central to that question, regardless of what we should expect about it.
> The premise of your question is flawed. The urban centers are not the hub of life and wealth in the U.S. like they are in European countries. The word "urban" is a pejorative here.
It is in New York. But what is your point here? That the reason broadband is worse in US urban centers is because there isn't as much income in urban centers compared to those abroad? Or that broadband is going to be worse because the US population prefers suburban areas?
> It's really not useful to judge national telecom policy by comparing U.S. cities to a few European cities that have invested heavily in telecom infrastructure as a way to differentiate themselves.
Again, the question was whether broadband was better or worse in the US. (And Poland was merely an example I remembered. Romania is another. There are many more).
> Almost all of the wealth of the area lives in the suburbs outside the city, which are served very well by fiber service.
Except they pay drastically more than international counterparts.
I am a bit confused by your position, can you summarize it as concisely as possible? You started out by saying that US broadband is not worse than internationally. Then you seemed to implicitly concede that it was worse but only because of price/cost-of-labor/government-policy/distribution-of-population-and-income. Is it "yes, broadband is more expensive but at least the suburbs get fiber"?
I still think the best public data is the FCC international broadband survey and report which I have previously referenced. The Ookla "promise" figures can be used to validate the advertised speeds in that dataset versus actual speeds.
The issue is not merely of availability of very high speed (>25mbps) connections but its price, an area in which the FCC study demonstrates the US is not competitive. [This information cannot be obtained from the data sets you mentioned].
Moreover, most people, certainly most people here, don't care about nation-wide or even state-wide averages, and they distort the figures, in favor of the US no less (rural Wyoming probably has better access than rural Romania, nobody cares about either). What are the figures for the main urban centers? As a datapoint, based on the FCC data I don't think there is a major US city which is competitive with Warsaw, Poland except possibly for Austin due to Google Fiber.
What would help settle this issue is if someone like Netflix , Google or Dropbox incorporated a speed test (they don't seem to test beyond their stream rates currently) and made the granular data public.
Finally, it is anecdotal but I have found those who have lived in Scandinavia (or Eastern Europe) and the US say pretty consistently that the broadband is much worse in the latter.