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Japan sets new internet speed world record — 4 million times faster than average US speeds
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds
According to this page, seemingly sourced from Ookla, US has way higher average speeds these days.
Japan had way faster internet on average than the US like twenty years ago, but the US actually did a decent amount of broadband growth even if it still doesn't cover rural areas well.
This is yet another thing the Republicans have been attacking (funding for rural broadband providers). Our rural areas are actually extremely well covered. Most of the midwest is fibered up. My local co-op’s minimum offered speed is 350x350.
I'm in a rural place and I just have DSL for my house and LTE for my phone. Lived here 20 years and that's the worst thing about it.
My condolences. We have one last office to convert at the coop I work for. We’ll be 100% fiber by the end of the year. Hope your ISP is close as well.
And the average speed of a passenger car is 170km/h, as ranked by speed data from the Nürburgring.
People on shitty slow connections don't have a need to go test that speed much, they know it's shit, people who just got their fancy new 1Gbit fiber and want to know exactly how fast it is, do.
I have no other ideas to collect that data better but i'm sure that does not give a good generic view of the reality. Every tech I know in Sweden uses bredbandskollen. Even if an end-users is asked if they did test speed and delay, the site was bredbandskollen in nearly 100% of the cases if they had done so. Therefore I dare say speedtest is missing data and that list has no statistical relevance outside the scope of the speedtest user population.
Also, measuring speedtest result tells us about the subscription users took out. It does not tell anything about availability. I can get Gbit here, but subscribed to 100/100 because my average is low
Not to mention that Japan tends to use their own local services usually so I'm not sure if speedtest.net is even well known there.
Is this all of Japan? I wonder what it looks like comparing just Tokyo with LA
Most DOCSIS (cable tv) systems are pushing gigabit speeds these days, especially in Los Angeles. That said, it is a bit of a misnomer considering CATV's upload speeds are still doodie compared to fiber.
Do you think Google Fiber made the average internet speed increase in part?
Wasn't Google Fiber available in like, one town in Kansas? So I suppose yes, it did increase the average speed, but by a very small amount.
Not quite. Google fiber did 2 things: 1) in any market thry entered, they forced an ante speed and 2) they provided a model that a bunch of local coops and/or municipal networks could follow (and did)
They are currently in 28 markets in the US.
A good point for Google
I feel they may have been something of a catalyst that got other providers to start upping the speed. At this point, a lot of service providers offer at least 1 gig download speeds, with fiber being synchronous often. Some places offer up to 10 gigs to residential.
Japan seeming to be ahead of the curve 20 years ago but now being at the same level or behind, seems to be a common theme.
Could be related to their stagnating economy and population. Conservatives love to point to Japan as a successful ethnostate, but their xenophobia has directly led to the stagnation.