Virginia's high in Internet speed

Date published: 8/23/2008

THIS MAY come as a surprise to those in the Fredericksburg area still plodding around the Internet on dial-up, waiting in exasperation for the build-out of broadband access.

But we're living on the fast lane of America's information highway. Virginia has left California and New York behind in the cyber dust.

A new report by the Communications Workers of America says the Old Dominion has jumped to the fourth-highest median connection speed in the nation at 5.0 mbps, way up from a ranking of 11th in the country last year.

Rhode Island tops the CWA list at 6.8 mbps, while Internet users wait the longest for downloads in Alaska, at 0.8 mbps. According to the report, "the same file that takes 30 seconds to download in Rhode Island would take more than four minutes in Alaska."

The national report is based on data from nearly 230,000 Internet users who took the CWA's online Speed Matters Test. The CWA's fastest five were Delaware (6.7 mbps), New Jersey (5.8 mbps), Virginia (5.0 mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6 mbps) and Idaho (1.3 mbps).

The CWA credits Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine "for bringing attention to this important issue through the creation of the Broadband Task Force, which promotes build-out of broadband access across Virginia." And Kaine does deserve praise for efforts including the state's investment of $300 million into broadband networks in rural parts of the state. Part of that money came from proceeds from the class-action tobacco litigation of the 1990s, so if you lit up cigarettes 10 years ago, you're lighting up laptops now.

"It is a work in progress," Kaine told BroadbandCen sus.com recently. "I am fortunate in that the chairman of my broadband committee who is working on this is a guy who knows a little bit about the telecom industry." That would be Mark Warner. The Web site notes that Warner, the Virginia governor who preceded Kaine, was a cellular telecommunications executive before being elected in 2001.

Date published: 8/23/2008