Broadband providers in the US have long hawked their wares in “up to” terms. You know—”up to” 10Mbps, where “up to” sits like a tiny pebble beside the huge font size of the raw number.
In reality, no one gets these speeds. That’s not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report (PDF) shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that “up to” speed they had hoped to achieve.
After crunching the data, FCC wonks have concluded that ISPs advertised an average (mean) “up to” download speed of 6.7Mbps in 2009. That’s not what broadband users got, though.
“However, FCC analysis shows that the median actual speed consumers experienced in the first half of 2009 was roughly 3 Mbps, while the average (mean) actual speed was approximately 4 Mbps,” says the report. “Therefore actual download speeds experienced by US consumers appear to lag advertised speeds by roughly 50 percent.”
View more at the source (Ars )
people are stupid