Among Rhode Island’s many pleasures, from its beaches to its arts scene, is a particularly utilitarian benefit – the Ocean State boasts the fastest Internet speeds in the United States.
Rhode Island has ranked No. 1 two years in a row in the Communications Workers of America union’s Speed Matters survey, which last August put the state’s median download speed at 6.77 megabits per second (Mbps), more than double the median speed nationally.
So it came as a surprise when the enterprise-applications company Akamai, in its most recent “State of the Internet” report, said that Rhode Island’s total percentage of broadband Internet users had dropped by 22 percent in the third quarter of 2008, with only 66 percent of connections at speeds over 2 Mbps.
That, combined with double-digit increases in other states, pushed Rhode Island from No. 2 to No. 28 in the quarterly report’s broadband rankings, which are based on usage statistics from Akamai’s international server network.
It sounded alarming, and raised questions about whether Rhode Islanders might be cutting back on their Internet packages to deal with a worsening economy. But David Belson, an analyst at Akamai who worked on the report, said the speed dip was most likely a statistical anomaly caused by heavy traffic pushing average speeds below the 2-Mbps cutoff point.
Bruce Leichtman, president of the Leichtman Research Group, which tracks the telecommunications and cable industries, agreed. “That is just a blip,” he said. “If anything, Rhode Island is getting faster. You’re in the top ranks because of Cox’s early entry [into the broadband market], and then you add onto that [Verizon’s] FiOS, so there is no way you dropped by 22 percent.”
Indeed, Cox Communications and Verizon Communications spokesmen said they have not seen any evidence of consumers paring back their Internet packages. “On the contrary, we have seen a significant growth in the use of broadband for all segments of customers,” said Verizon spokesman Phil Santoro.
Cox, which offers speeds of 1.5 Mbps in its value package, has not seen customers dropping higher-speed connections to save money, according to Jonathan Leepson, Cox’s director of product marketing. Most Cox customers buy the company’s “Preferred” level of service, which has offered download speeds of up to 12.5 Mbps since it was upgraded last year, he said.
Leepson also noted that “Rhode Island is still a leader in speeds of over 5 Mbps, in large part due to our efforts to make Rhode Island the most broadband-ready state in the nation.”
According to the Akamai report, 47 percent the state’s Internet connections have download speeds of 5 Mbps or more, the third-highest level in the nation. The state also ranks near the bottom in the percentage of dial-up connections.
Levi Maaia, vice president of the independent East Bay service provider Full Channel, said his company has noted Internet sales slowing over the past two months, although there has been no evidence of people reducing their Internet speeds.
Indeed, when Full Channel introduced an economy package a year ago, “one of the fears was that people would downgrade,” he said. “But that wasn’t the case.”
Leichtman, the industry analyst, said the Internet has become a utility and it would “go against our evolutionary track” to slow it down, recession or not.
“People don’t go from driving a car to driving a bicycle,” he said. “Sure, they’re both vehicles, but you’re not going to go from four wheels to two wheels.” In addition, bundled service packages, which were first introduced by Cox, have made consumers less likely to alter their setups.
However, Leichtman also noted that over 40 percent of American households with incomes under $30,000 do not have a home computer, and broadband use is “very segregated by income level.” He said he would not be surprised if new customers choose slower-speed Internet packages.
Experts give credit for Rhode Island’s leadership in fostering high Internet speeds to Cox, the state’s dominant telecommunications company, which since 1995 has spent more than $500 million building a fiber-optic/coaxial network in Rhode Island. A decade later, Verizon Communications began building its own fiber-optic network to compete with Cox.
“Rhode Island was ahead of the country in many ways … because of the early rollout from the cable providers,” Leichtman said. •
