Consumers love to complain about their Internet service providers, but according to new stats from the FCC, ISPs in the U.S. are doing a good job of providing their customers with advertised Web speeds.
A Sept. 2012 test found that ISPs, on average, delivered 97 percent of advertised download speeds during peak periods, up from 96 percent earlier that year.
"Faster broadband has brought untold benefits to millions of Americans - from distance learning to distance healthcare," FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement. "This is good news for consumers and the economy, but we can't be satisfied. To unleash innovation and realize broadband's full potential, we must continue to see increases in broadband speed and capacity."
The FCC said that consumers are making the move to faster speed tiers more now than ever. The average tier selected by people is 15.6 Mbps, up from 14.3 Mbps last year.
"Nearly half of consumers who subscribed to speeds of less than 1 Mbps six months ago have adopted higher speeds, and nearly a quarter of the users who subscribed to speeds between 1 Mbps and 3 Mbps have upgraded to faster speed tiers," the FCC said.
Meanwhile, the FCC incorporated satellite broadband into its results for the first time this year. At this point, the commission said it is only evaluating service from ViaSat, but will add more satellite providers over time.
Specifically, the FCC's tests found that among the 15 ISPs tested, they all delivered 80 percent of advertised download speeds during peak periods, with the majority delivering 90 percent or higher.
"However, performance varies among service tiers," the commission found. "For example, Windstream's 12 Mbps tier delivers 72 percent of advertised speed, a low across all ISPs and speed tiers. In contrast, Windstream's best performing service tier of 3 Mbps tier delivers 85 percent of advertised speed."
In the chart below, which lays out average peak period sustained download and upload speeds as a percentage of advertised speeds, ViaSat is No. 1, with consumers receiving 140 percent or better of the advertised speed of 12 Mbps.
Cablevision and Verizon FiOS, meanwhile, were neck-in-neck for the No. 2 and No. 3 spots in terms of download speed. "Two different ISPs (Cablevision and Verizon), using different technologies (cable and fiber), were both able to deliver peak period speeds of 115 percent of advertised rates during peak periods, suggesting that engineering and deployment rules, in addition to technology, are a crucial component of overall service quality," the FCC found.
"The FCC's findings reaffirm the results from the past two FCC broadband performance tests, which found that FiOS Internet provides blazing-fast and sustained upstream and downstream speeds as well as low latency even during the peak Internet usage time periods of 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. local time," John Wismatt, senior vice president of product development for Verizon's consumer and mass market business unit, said in a statement.
"Consistently faster Internet service helps consumers get more value from all the Internet-connected devices they're using," Wismatt said.
In 2010, the FCC launched a broadband testing tool that asked users to test their Internet connection quality and report that data to the commission. That proved useful, but the data was affected by things like a user's computer and connection technologies like routers. As recommended by the National Broadband Plan, the FCC opted to conduct "more consistent tests" of broadband speed using automated direct measurements of broadband performance, prompting annual reports that began in 2011.
Other ISPs evaluated by the FCC included AT&T, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Frontier, Insight, Mediacom, Qwest, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon DSL.
