First of all, Singapore, Hong Kong and Monaco really can't be compared to the US. Two of them are wealthy city-states and Monaco is very small (and wealthy).
Once you get to #4 Switzerland, the difference is negligible. The difference between a 200mbps connection and 222 is barely noticeable. It's more than enough to stream movies and use the internet at home, and it's way too slow if you are running a large tech heavy operation. But if you are in the latter group, chances are you aren't doing it at home and much faster commercial broadband of 1GB+ is readily available in most major cities. And if you are like most places, you probably do most of your heavy lifting in data centers belonging to Msft/google/amazon, where the internet speeds are significantly faster.
It seems to me that the important metric is not average speed, but % of people with, say, reliable connections of 50mbps or faster. That's probably how much you need for reasonable home usage with with a few TVs streaming. I don't think most people will notice the difference beyond that.
Agreed. It's hard to really know how useful these stats are. First, who are the people using speedtest.net? I'd assume there is some kind of bias in the person using speedtest.net. But also, if you can't get any broadband, does that count against the stats?
Second, what's the distribution? Is it some people with 10Gbps+ and then some with 1Mbps?
Third, how is upload factored in? With e.g. video conferencing/home office/remote learning, symmetric internet is becoming more important, and latency plays a part.
And finally, how expensive is it? Personally, I think it's not great claiming e.g. Monaco has amazing speeds if a lot of people can't afford it.
If these are averages, then they are most likely skewed by outliers. I want to know the median values, and various interesting percentiles, like 5th, 25th, 75th, 95th, 98th, 99th, etc….
I'm fairly skeptical of this figure, with most sq mi of the US unable to get anything like that.
Further, the typical upload speed for a 200Mbit cable connection is ~10Mbit. I can't see enough symmetric providers to skew the avg upload numbers that far.
note that we don’t need 50mbps (and certainly not 200) for most homes/families either. 25mbps comfortably supports 3 1080p streams with room left over for web, email, and other apps.
Even ideal, uninterrupted deliveries don't happen in a steady stream. Data arrives in bursts. I've seen 25Mbit connections choke on far less.
God help anyone with a 25Mbit/down cable connection who tries sync their media to the cloud. That <5MBit upload will not only take forever, the saturated outbound pipe impedes ACK packets for incoming traffic - which forces inbound video and other connections to stutter while waiting for their endlessly retransmitted ACKs to arrive.
Real life also commonly includes gaming. Steam updates alone max'd out our 500Mb connection.
i've been sharing 25mbps with another person and the occasional guest for the past couple years, often including multiple video streams at a time. there have been some relatively rare upstream buffering issues (as most issues are with wifi), but overall, it's been just fine.
gaming doesn't seem like a good case for making a general bandwidth argument. sure, if you want to spend your money on bandwidth for it, go to town, but the general populace doesn't 'need' it. video at least is used for communication, education, and other non-recreational purposes.
It's not about the 50 mbps download bandwidth here. It's a combination of bandwidth, latency, and variance in latency on both the upload and download links. Usually residential 50 mbps is a peak download bandwidth of 50 mbps with pretty high variance latency. 50 mbps symmetric with low latency would be fantastic among 3 individuals, but when realistic speeds are 30/5 mbps down/up with bursts of high latency, you're in for a frustrating time.
I was on 25mbps during lockdown with my parents for a few months and it was very painful. You probably don’t need the 500 I get now but 25 is not good.
2 Hong Kong (SAR) 254.40
3 Monaco 242.89
4 Switzerland 222.00
5 Thailand 221.00
6 Romania 217.91
7 South Korea 216.67
8 Denmark 216.13
9 Chile 209.83
10 France 201.61
11 Hungary 201.55
12 United States 199.00
First of all, Singapore, Hong Kong and Monaco really can't be compared to the US. Two of them are wealthy city-states and Monaco is very small (and wealthy).
Once you get to #4 Switzerland, the difference is negligible. The difference between a 200mbps connection and 222 is barely noticeable. It's more than enough to stream movies and use the internet at home, and it's way too slow if you are running a large tech heavy operation. But if you are in the latter group, chances are you aren't doing it at home and much faster commercial broadband of 1GB+ is readily available in most major cities. And if you are like most places, you probably do most of your heavy lifting in data centers belonging to Msft/google/amazon, where the internet speeds are significantly faster.
It seems to me that the important metric is not average speed, but % of people with, say, reliable connections of 50mbps or faster. That's probably how much you need for reasonable home usage with with a few TVs streaming. I don't think most people will notice the difference beyond that.