U.S. Broadband Holding Up Under Work-From-Home Strain, Speedtest Finds

While Americans hunker right down to wait out the COVID-19 storm and online schooling goes into full swing, U.S. broadband speeds are largely holding up to the challenge, consistent with new stats from PCMag's sibling company Ookla Speedtest.

Fixed broadband speeds within the U.S. have largely flattened out after a small dip between March 15 and 22, Ookla's results show, although speeds in Canada are continuing a slow decline. Both countries still have considerably better broadband than Mexico or much of Europe, consistent with the results, with average speeds between 110 and 140Mbps.

Mobile broadband speeds are slightly down week over week, but it is not a pointy decline. There's nothing within the U.S. or Canada charts, as an example , that appears just like the giant drop by mobile broadband speeds that Ookla Speedtest saw in China over the Chinese New Year's Day holiday.

Remember, once I say "better broadband," that's within the aggregate. It doesn't suggest that there aren't rural Americans or Canadians battling very slow connections — just that they are a comparatively small percentage of the general population.

AT&T says that each one of its network traffic was up 19 percent month-on-month last Sunday, although it didn't escape wireline versus mobile usage.

Your broadband should have problems

So if U.S. broadband speeds aren't declining, why are you having trouble together with your Zoom calls?

We're using our home broadband more heavily, and in new ways, than we've before. While the web backbones do fine, your home Wi-Fi network might not be, otherwise you could also be hitting the bandwidth cap on your service plan, or the server you're trying to contact could also be overwhelmed. (Microsoft says that in Italy, its Teams video-calling system has seen an enormous spike in traffic.)

Several stories recently have checked out how common household electronics like microwave ovens or Bluetooth devices can crowd the two .4GHz band on which many Wi-Fi networks rely. (One solution there's to modify your home router to 5GHz mode.) Weak Wi-Fi signals you'll not have noticed before may not be appropriate for online schooling; to repair that, you'll want to seem at a whole-home Wi-Fi setup. (We have a roundup of the simplest ones.)