Todd Spangler over at cable-industry trade magazine Multichannel News crows that cable operators came out on top in 2011 in terms of speed. According to data compiled over at the Ookla Net Index, the six fastest residential ISPs in the U.S. based on average download speed were Comcast, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications.
The rankings only included the nation's largest carriers (omitting smaller, faster municipal, independent Co-Op or Google fiber operations) and results from both DSL and FTTH/N were blended together, bringing down average speeds for both AT&T and Verzion:
Comcast and Charter delivered average download speeds of 17.19 Megabits per second, followed by Cablevision at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at 15.76 Mbps, TWC at 14.41 Mbps and Insight at 14.22 Mbps. Verizon Communications fared better than its telco peers with an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps, thanks to FiOS Internet, its fiber-to-the-home service that provides up to 150 Mbps downstream. And overall, Verizon had the highest upstream speeds with an average of 7.41 Mbps. Still, the company's legacy DSL services dragged down overall speeds.
Cable's dominance isn't expected to change anytime soon here in the States, with many more rural-focused telcos (Windstream, CenturyLink, Frontier, Fairpoint) lacking the funds to seriously upgrade to fiber to the home, and larger companies like AT&T and Verizon all but halting their last mile upgrades.read comment(s)