Broadband speeds stall in US

Broadband speeds have stalled in North America while rising sharply in Asia and the Pacific according to a study by London based research firm, Point Topic. The study compared speeds from Q2 to Q3 this year.

Broadband speeds in North America remained stuck averaging a sluggish 2.97 Mbps. In comparison, South & East Asia rose sharply 3.582 Mbps, while Asia Pacific had the fastest speeds, averaging 14.989 Mbps. Western Europe had speeds of 5.552 Mbps.

"The most significant changes were seen in Asia Pacific and South and East Asia," says Fiona Vanier, Research Analyst at Point Topic. She said this was due to operators such as China Tietong and Japan's NTT which have introduced services with downstream speeds as high as 100 Mbps."

The largest change was seen in South & East Asia, where the average downstream speed increased by over 130%. The two operators responsible for this increase are China Tietong and China Telecom.

Verizon recently announced it would be lifting speeds to 50Mbps for some of its fiber based markets. And late last week cable giant Comcast announced an aggressive deployment of its DOCSIS 3.0 infrastructure in 2008, predicting it will offer DOCSIS 3.0 capability--and the promise of 100 Mbps speeds--in 20 percent of its market area by the end of 2008.

For more:
-Point Topic Broadband Tariff Trends report

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- Verizon lifts speed and cost Report