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Ookla's latest Speedtest.net report for the U.s. is in, and it's got some skillful news: cyberspace speeds have become noticeably faster. Broadband customers across the U.s. are at present seeing average speeds over 50Mps down for the beginning time — specifically, 54.97Mbps, a 40 percent increase over this fourth dimension a year agone, while upload speeds jumped 51 per centum to xviii.88Mbps.

The U.s. telecom sector has seen considerable consolidation in the past few years, as Ookla notes in the report, with AT&T's conquering of DirecTV, and Altice United states'southward purchase of Cablevision in back 2015. However, it says this twelvemonth's large merger betwixt Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Brilliant Business firm Networks could have the largest affect.

The biggest bright spot is the growth of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), or cobweb optic connections. That doesn't include Verizon FiOS, which was commencement out of the gate. But it seems to have stalled out in growth and isn't much better or faster than conventional cable these days except on upload speed, as this nautical chart shows:

Ookla Fastest ISPs

Credit: Speedtest.net

The real growth instead is in gigabit fiber optic, with the most notable existence the (still not widely available) Google Fiber. The report notes some pocket-size cities have local ISPs that have begun to offer fiber connections to the dwelling house besides.

On the mobile side, speeds have jumped over thirty percent on the four major U.s. carriers, averaging 19Mbps down in the first half of 2016. AT&T, Dart, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless take all pushed hard to aggrandize their LTE networks. Here, the problem isn't so much speed every bit in coverage; getting 10Mbps or 30Mbps on LTE is less important if you tin only get 2G or 3G in sure parts of the Us, or worse, nothing at all. I've reviewed hundreds of phones over the years and take found countless dead spots during testing, fifty-fifty in areas that providers typically say offering the all-time coverage on the maps they provide to the public. Information technology's go much ameliorate, but it'southward a picayune chore to find LTE dead spots but outside major cities even today.

Fastest mobile networks

Credit: Speedtest.net

So overall, there'due south progress, but unfortunately the US is still running far behind some other nations. Nosotros rank but 20th overall in stock-still broadband worldwide and a disappointing 42nd on the mobile side. Worse, not everyone in the U.s. is seeing even these speeds; a recent FCC study on broadband progress establish that 10 percent of Americans lack access to at least 25Mbps down and 3Mbps, and 39 percentage of Americans when focusing specifically on rural customers (though just 4 percent lack access to those speeds in cities).

The report said that cobweb optic network deployment "has the potential to bring a quantum jump in speeds to many U.Southward. markets in the coming years," but that provider consolidation means at that place'south less incentive for ISPs to invest in those performance gains. Overall, a decent progress report, but providers have plenty of piece of work to do — peculiarly as people continue to move to an always-on, ever-connected world, where streaming 4K video and multiplayer gaming is the norm.

You can read the full Ookla Speedtest.net market report for more details; it includes an interactive map that lets you click on private cities and states for localized examination results.

Disclaimer: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, which also publishes ExtremeTech.com.