Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1123581321 | Hacker News Reader

Median download speeds in the US are generally 50-70mbps with a few outliers. Here’s a state map.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-sl...

Cities will of course be higher, typically ranging from 100-900 for non-gigabit. Rural is more frustrating, and will hopefully be alleviated by the new satellite ISPs coming online.

View on HN

you must not live in a city -- older homes and older sections of a city are very late to get physical upgrades.

Used to live in Philly. Had fiber gigabit in old building. Please stop making assumptions.

I’ve lived in many kinds of places. But please focus on the data I provided. There are of course exceptions to the general trend of speeds being higher in more densely connected areas.

S/older/poorer/g

Here is the fiber map for a Minneapolis ISP laying their own fiber: https://usinternet.com/fiber/coverage-map/

The unwired parts of the city are where poor people live, the wired parts are where not poor people live.

it makes sense though, can poorer people afford faster speeds?

That map is pretty close to being a population map: https://xkcd.com/1138/

I think that speed by state is a pretty bad measure for conveying anything useful. Speeds vary within each state by orders of magnitude, depending on whether you can get a connection to a particular medium or not.

I bet the full data set of speeds is not a bell curve. There are probably huge peaks for each medium, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the mode and mean are significantly different.

Yes, it’s not great, but I hoped it would serve to correct the misperception that such slow speeds are typical in the US. I hope I can find better data next time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com