Feeling a bit sluggish, Seattle? Perhaps a move to Austin, San Francisco or Boston will perk you up.
Pando Networks, which delivers content and downloads for MMO games, has released its annual American Broadband Study. And in it, Seattle ranks fourth for average download speeds among the largest cities in the U.S., with an average 805 KBps.
Not surprisingly, all the of top spots went to tech hubs: Austin at 841 KBps, San Francisco at 828 KBps and Boston at 827 KBps. New York rounded out the top five at 787 KBps. (Portland came in at 630 KBps.)
The slugs in need of digital caffeine? El Paso was at the very bottom of the list of 35 large cities with 483 KBps, just below Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque and Denver.
Pando’s methodology measures the speeds for the downloads it handles (which it estimates at more than 200 million each year) to produce an estimate of the average speeds consumers experience. As a result, these aren’t best-case speeds advertised by Internet service providers (such as those included in the National Broadband Map), but a sample of actual average speeds in real-world use.
The study also crowned Comcast as the fastest ISP, with average download speeds of 941 KBps.
