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The USA finished 20th in the world in average internet speeds.
http://www.speedtest.net/awards/us
You can look at regions and even major cities for more detailed information, but below was our national chart for 2015:
USA
The most up-to-date charts for the broadband cable providers were printed at Hot Hardware today:
http://hothardware.com/news/us-internet-speeds-improve-but-the-country-ranks-only-20th-in-the-world
***Note: "Spectrum" is Charter***
As gamers, we would be more interested in "ping" than any of these, so long as your speeds are above a certain minimum. Speedtest offers an arm of their service that specializes in that (although when you run a Speedtest from your browser or their app on your phone/tablet it will give you a general Ping reading):
http://www.pingtest.net/
Nevertheless, don't underestimate the need for such a minimum, especially for upload speeds, and especially if you live in a more rural area with inferior coverage. If your average upload speed is below 1.0 Mbps, as it is in many rural areas, for example, then that means your dips and nadir will probably be too low to supply your required data to the game server, and that means lag on your end (not on your opponent's end) which will overwhelmingly favor the player with the better connection since his connection isn't choked as the game spits out "flickers" of accurate information for your position, and not vice versa.
Otherwise, it never hurts to have the best download and upload speeds. Upload speeds tend to vary much more generously between providers than download speeds. For most users, you want the best download speeds. Even if the download + upload is better for a certain provider, then I would still gravitate towards the ISP with better download speeds.
Other than piracy upload groups I can't think of anyone who would care much about upload speeds outside of people who do a lot of multimedia work with the cloud where they're uploading a ton of content to the web. This seems like something that is more appealing to the mainstream on mobile networks when your smartphone camera is linked to the iCloud or Dropbox or Photo-hosting web services for pictures and videos, but the people who do really intensive work here probably spare their mobile networks the expensive bandwidth, and process the uploads via their broadband ISP's at home after transferring the data from the phone to a PC.
Obviously value may be a factor since these charts don't differentiate plans or their cost rates at all, and they don't offer very specific data on effective bandwidths outside major metropolitan areas. It's more of a generalized heads up.
http://www.speedtest.net/awards/us
You can look at regions and even major cities for more detailed information, but below was our national chart for 2015:
USA
The most up-to-date charts for the broadband cable providers were printed at Hot Hardware today:
http://hothardware.com/news/us-internet-speeds-improve-but-the-country-ranks-only-20th-in-the-world
***Note: "Spectrum" is Charter***
As gamers, we would be more interested in "ping" than any of these, so long as your speeds are above a certain minimum. Speedtest offers an arm of their service that specializes in that (although when you run a Speedtest from your browser or their app on your phone/tablet it will give you a general Ping reading):
http://www.pingtest.net/
Nevertheless, don't underestimate the need for such a minimum, especially for upload speeds, and especially if you live in a more rural area with inferior coverage. If your average upload speed is below 1.0 Mbps, as it is in many rural areas, for example, then that means your dips and nadir will probably be too low to supply your required data to the game server, and that means lag on your end (not on your opponent's end) which will overwhelmingly favor the player with the better connection since his connection isn't choked as the game spits out "flickers" of accurate information for your position, and not vice versa.
Otherwise, it never hurts to have the best download and upload speeds. Upload speeds tend to vary much more generously between providers than download speeds. For most users, you want the best download speeds. Even if the download + upload is better for a certain provider, then I would still gravitate towards the ISP with better download speeds.
Other than piracy upload groups I can't think of anyone who would care much about upload speeds outside of people who do a lot of multimedia work with the cloud where they're uploading a ton of content to the web. This seems like something that is more appealing to the mainstream on mobile networks when your smartphone camera is linked to the iCloud or Dropbox or Photo-hosting web services for pictures and videos, but the people who do really intensive work here probably spare their mobile networks the expensive bandwidth, and process the uploads via their broadband ISP's at home after transferring the data from the phone to a PC.
Obviously value may be a factor since these charts don't differentiate plans or their cost rates at all, and they don't offer very specific data on effective bandwidths outside major metropolitan areas. It's more of a generalized heads up.
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