Broadband
August 14, 2008 – 10:25 pm by BHJohn Timmer at ars technica discusses results from a report by the Communications Workers of America (ars):
The median broadband user in the States is getting about 2.3mbps and uploading at 435kbps. That compares pretty unfavorably to some of the industrialized Asian nations, where the median download speed is 63mbps, or Korea, where it’s 49mbps. European nations also do well, with Finnish users getting over nine times the bandwidth, and France over seven times. Even going north of the border to Canada would likely to get you a substantial increase in speed, as the median downloader there gets 7.6mbps.
This hits close to home since I finally decided to try out the new movie rental feature through the Sony Playstation online store. The PS3 is a great Blu-ray player and has the bonus feature of supporting video games. The rental store is a different matter however, and it’s not all Sony’s fault. I ordered an HD version of Hellboy but I’m still waiting for it to download. Theoretically you can stream the video, however it kept stopping and buffering, which made the movie unwatchable. Apparently downloading an 8 gig file takes just less than infinity. I finally just downloaded the standard version and that worked well enough, with just a few hiccups. The most maddening part of all of this is that the technology is available, just not in the richest country in the world.
