In what has become a familiar refrain, the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai shows the US trailing in a number of metrics, including average connection speeds and broadband penetration.

As the FCC is set to announce the first official national broadband policy in March, the study underscores the need for that policy to encourage expansion of high-speed networking infrastructure (which it appears poised to do) as well as drive the necessary competition to make broadband connections more affordable (which it won't apparently address in much detail).

Akamai bases its statistics on data gathered from its network of 56,000 servers spread around the world, part of its optimized media delivery system. This gives Akamai an extremely large data set to mine for information like the number of unique IP addresses accessing its services and their connection speeds. Sifting through this data and linking IP addresses to specific locations allows for some fairly detailed analysis.

Middle of the pack

Unfortunately for the US, the data is pretty mixed. For the third quarter of 2009, the average connection speed for the country was 3.9Mbps, placing the US in 18th place globally. Unsurprisingly, South Korea topped the list with an average of 14.6Mbps, almost twice the average of second-place Japan with 7.9Mbps.

Asian and European countries filled the top ten, with Ireland and the Czech Republic making particularly large gains in average speed year-over-year. The US average was actually down slightly, 2.4 percent year-over-year.

Around the country, New England and the Southwest tended to have the highest average connection speeds. Some cities in particular had blazingly fast averages—Sandy, Utah; Iowa City, Iowa; Norman, Oklahoma; Logan, Utah; and Clemson, South Carolina all had speed averages well over 20Mbps. Sandy, Utah was identified as the fastest city in the country when it comes to speedy Internet—its average speed was 32.7Mbps.

Broadband connectivity, fastest countries. The US ranks 35th, behind most of Europe and Asia.

Akamai uses unique IP numbers per capita to measure penetration rates. (At least one study considers per capita measurements a flawed metric, noting that 60 percent of households in the US have Internet access.)

For total Internet connectivity, the study ranks the US fifth worldwide, but 15th in broadband penetration. Akamai defines "broadband" (perhaps rather generously) as 2Mbps or higher. Compared to speedier countries, the US ranked a lowly 35th place, with just 57 percent of connections at 2Mbps or higher. The US fared better when comparing the percentage of connections with "high broadband" speeds of 5Mbps or higher. Here, the US ranked 12th globally, with 24 percent of its connections counted as "high broadband."

Recent studies show that US customers also pay a lot more for what they get. For our average of 3.9Mbps, we pay about $40 per month. In France, by comparison, many users have access to a $45 monthly plan that includes 20-30Mbps connections, VoIP service, and HDTV with a DVR included. Such plans in the US regularly exceed $100, and speeds rarely reach those levels. (Let's not even speak of the state of customer service.)

The latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows a strong correlation between income level and broadband adoption, suggesting that high prices may be one of the factors limiting adoption.

Listing image by Akamai