Your fastest Internet in the world is found in Berkeley, CA

By Nate Anderson

If you want the fastest average broadband speed in the world, don't move to Japan. Instead, buckle up your Birkenstocks and pile into the VW Bus, because it's time for a road trip to Berkeley, California, home of the fastest average Internet speeds on earth.

This nugget of data comes courtesy of the most recent State of the Internet report from Akamai Technologies, which collects and analyzes a unique data set of worldwide speeds and IP address usage. When all of the company's speed data was sorted by city, three US locations top the list before South Korea and Japan begin to dominate.

Those three spots are Berkeley (average speed: 18.7Mbps), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (average speed: 17.5Mbps), and Stanford, California (average speed: 17.0Mbps). The next US city on the list is Durham, North Carolina (average speed: 13.6Mbps) in eighth place, followed by Ithaca, New York; Ann Arbor, Michigan; College Station, Texas; Urbana, Illinois; Cambridge, Massachusetts; University Park, Pennsylvania; and East Lansing, Michigan.

If you're not from the US, you might not see the pattern: each of these cities houses a major research university. Akamai obtained these results by filtering out all cities with less than 50,000 unique IP addresses, to make sure that the averages weren't affected by outlying small cities. The result was that "so-called 'college towns' are some of the best connected in the United States."

As someone who lived in Chapel Hill for years and spent plenty of time in Durham, this result raised a huge and obvious question: are these high speeds truly representative of what home users in those communities can purchase, or are they largely a result of on-campus high-speed access from Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill? (My guess would be the latter, especially in Durham.)

The college town advantage

Akamai had the same question, fortunately. Their answer: "However, what this likely represents is the extremely high speed connections these university/college campuses have to the Internet, as opposed to particularly high-speed consumer broadband services available to local residents. (However, it may also be the case that the speed of local consumer broadband offerings is potentially higher than average.)"

Regular readers may recall that last week we looked into the claim by Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg that US broadband was number one in the world. Akamai's data, showing that these top US cities beat out anything in Japan, south Korea, and Europe, would seem evidence for that assertion. But consider Akamai's explanation; if universities are actually the drivers of these high speeds, which are not then available to community residents, they don't say much about the state of US consumer broadband at all.

Indeed, when you filter the list to exclude US towns with a major college in the middle of them, every US city on the list goes away. This also applies to other countries, of course; Norway's top entry on the list is Trondheim (average speed: 10.6Mbps), home to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The UK's top entry is Oxford. South Korea's top city, Masan, also has a couple of colleges.

The data, then, is of limited use if we care about arguing over consumer broadband and where it's best. But it does remind us of one thing: around the world, if you want fast Internet, it's good to be a student.