By Michael Martinez
(Monday, June 25) Rhode Islanders have access to the fastest Internet speeds in the country, but the connections are still seven times slower than those widely available in some other countries, according to a report released Monday.
A study compiled by the Communications Workers of America found that Rhode Island boasts the fastest download and upload speeds of all the states, but other countries have faster speeds thanks to more robust broadband infrastructures.
CWA recorded the speeds of nearly 80,000 people in all 50 states and the District of Columbia by allowing them to test their connections on its Speedmatters.org site. The group found that the median download speed in the United States was 1.9 megabits per second, which is about 30 times slower than the median speed in Japan.
Because so few people with dial-up connections participated in the test, CWA added that the actual median Internet speed in the United States is lower than the one it calculated.
Kansas, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts rounded up CWA's top five for download speed. New Jersey and New York also were among the five fastest uploading states. Alaska ranked last for both downloading and uploading. The report found that files of similar sizes would take roughly 12 times longer to download in Alaska than in Rhode Island.
Despite scoring in the bottom half for download speed, the District of Columbia ranked second in the uploading category.
The slow speeds across the board when compared with other nations are limiting the ways Americans can use the Internet, CWA said. According to the report, most U.S. connections are too slow to run home-based businesses and medical monitoring or to facilitate distance learning.
CWA urged federal lawmakers to adopt a nationwide policy goal of building broadband infrastructure capable of downloading at 10 megabits per second by 2010. The report also advocated policies to ensure the equal treatment of content on broadband networks and recommended an overhaul of a federal program that subsidizes telecommunications services in rural and low-income areas.
"It is long past time to restore U.S. leadership in high-speed Internet policy," the report said. "The U.S. has a lot of ground to cover to remain competitive with other economies that have already adopted policies that will facilitate job growth, business advancement and individual achievement through access to the latest information technologies."
In a teleconference, CWA President Larry Cohen said the United States will not catch up to the rest of the world if it allows the deployment of broadband to be left to market forces. He said other countries have taken much more initiative and that it would be bad public policy for U.S. lawmakers to "wait and hope" for the country's broadband capability to improve.
"The rest of the world knows this," he said.
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