As I’ve said countless times before; our nation is falling way behind in the world of internet communications. The latest international rankings now has the U.S. in 26th place when it comes to internet speed:

When South Koreans tested their wired broadband connections over the past 30 days, they found an average downstream speed of 34.14M bps (bits per second), according to the Net Index, which was introduced on Tuesday by Ookla, the creator of Speedtest. That was several times the worldwide average of 7.67M bps and 100 times as fast as the 340K bps downstream speed in Sudan, the lowest average out of 152 ranked countries.

Latvia (24.29M bps), the Republic of Moldova (21.37M bps), Japan (20.29M bps) and Sweden (19.78M bps) rounded out the top five countries for downstream broadband. The U.S. was ranked 26th in the world, with an average downstream speed of 10.16M bps. Upstream rankings were similar, with South Korea leading at 18.04M bps and the U.S. in 27th place with 2.21M bps. The world average was 2.10M bps.

This also doesn’t count penetration and price. The U.S. has some of the highest cost internet and still has large portions of the country without access to broadband. It’s really hard for us to compete in a 21st century economy with 20th century technology. If we don’t wake up soon, it will be too late and too costly to recover.