FCC: Consumers Get Half of Advertised Broadband Speed

The actual download speeds that consumers get are about half of those promised by service providers, according to a report released this week by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

In 2009, U.S. residential consumers subscribed to broadband services with an average and median advertised download speed of 7 Mbps to 8 Mbps, respectively, the FCC said. But the actual average speed they received was 4 Mbps and the actual median speed was 3 Mbps.

The FCC criticized the use of maximum rather than actual speeds and said it will support efforts to develop a better way to represent bandwidth.

The maximum advertised speed ignores network congestion, underperforming computers and routers, and websites and applications that aren't optimized, the FCC said. "Yet this 'up to' speed is commonly the only metric that can be used to compare the speeds of different broadband offerings. The 'up to' speed, however, does not provide an accurate measure of likely end-user broadband experience," the FCC wrote in the report, released Tuesday.

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