New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported | Broadband for America

A new MIT study says that previous estimates of U.S. broadband speed may have underestimated just how fast our national networks really are. In March, the FCC said that the broadband network was only half as fast as advertised.

However, the MIT study found that those measurements didn’t fully measure the speed of the “access network,” which Internet service providers (ISPs) control. For example, using the best method, Ookla/Speedtest, current typical speeds are 7.7 Mbps, not 3.8 Mbps.

According to the study, a simple figure for broadband speed isn’t sufficient to understand the quality of the nation’s digital infrastructure, and it’s just as affected by a user’s computer and the location of servers being accessed as it is by the ISP.

That's a bit akin to attributing all of an iPhone's dropped call performance to AT&T, and attributing zero to the iPhone's design, to the extent that the device itself can cause dropped calls.

New MIT Study Finds Broadband Speeds Much Faster than FCC Reported