"Broadband Keeps Getting Faster, But Not in the U.S." Wrong.

“Broadband keeps getting faster, but not in the United States,” one writer says, reporting on new Speedtest data. Uh, not really. 

Speedtest data for the United States shows that both mobile and fixed network speeds increased between 2020 and 2021, for example. Mobile speed grew from 41 Mbps in 2020 to 91 Mbps in 2021. 

Fixed network speed increased from 153 Mbps in 2020 to 196 Mbps in 2021, according to Speedtest. It really does not matter that U.S. speed, ranked against others, is relatively faster or slower than in other countries. 

U.S. mobile speed grew 122 percent over 12 months; fixed network speed grew 28 percent over a year’s time. 

Evaluations of broadband speed within a country are one thing. Comparing speed between countries is something else. One cannot meaningfully measure progress within a country by looking at what happened in other countries. 

The rate of growth between countries is one thing. The rate of growth in any single country is something else.