As of March of this year, 47% of American households have a broadband connection to the Internet. For most people, this means a typical download speed of 1.5 Mbps (although there is no “standard” speed, and some providers only give their customers 256 Kbps downloads). That puts American broadband users about halfway down the chart on average download speed among the major industrialized countries.
This post at MuniWireless.com puts that into even better perspective: while Verizon is peddling its “superfast” 2 Mbps FiOS service to customers for $40/month, in Hong Kong $48.50/month will buy you 100 Mbps service…or you can splash out for 1 Gbps for just over $200/month. In fact, they are completely phasing out their 10 Mbps service as “too slow”.
(For comparison, 100 Mbps is the typical speed of an older office LAN, and many corporate LANs these days are 1 Gbps)
