Help Us All Get Better Bandwidth!

Consumer Broadband Test

March 22, 2010

2 Min Read

Network

This may seem off topic for gaming, but if you think about it, it's not. Everyone that plays games anymore is directly affected by their ISP. We are affected by thing like the amount of time to download a game (including consoles) to latency while in play. The US was one of the countries that started big in the beginning of the internet revolution. Somewhere along the way we sat down and never got off our ass! If you do a search you will see that the US ranks somewhere between 26^th and 29^th place compared to other countries for broadband speeds. Our ranking is even worse if you look up accessibility. Links like this are all too common.

The FCC has been trying to get us all better speeds and accessibility. However, they were relying on ISPs to report to them the speeds and accessibility they offer. They quickly learned that the ISPs are full of shit and lie. Take for example HughesNet which used to be Directway; they claimed to me that you could get satellite access interenet at speeds of 600 kbps. Please! I never saw over 340 and the latency for a ping was somewhere between 1200 and 1900ms! With that much latency most servers just dump your packets. I never got streaming music to ever work. Then they have things like FAP (fair access policies) that only allow 200Mb a day or they cut you off. This is just wonderful when you try to get a service pack from Microsoft for Windows that is 500Mb. Needless to say I dumped them.

Anyhow, the FCC got sick of the lies and now have a dedicated website you can go to and speed test your ISP for them so they have “real” real data to use. This is going to force the ISPs to start providing speeds comparable to other countries!

So PLEASE take the speed test from the FCC and help us all get better internet. In the end it means better gaming :)

You can read more and follow me and Neuron Games, Inc. here: