ISP Speeds Revealed – How Does Your County Compare?
PC Pitstop advertises its home-computer security product, PC Matic, nationwide. Because of this, PC Pitstop is able to acquire various data sets throughout 98.9% of the United States.
PC Pitstop decided to capitalize on this, by analyzing bandwidth speeds obtained through PC Matic scans. When a PC Matic scan is completed, different benchmarks are collected. One of these benchmarks is the internet download and upload speeds.
The bandwidth data was collected over the past 18 months, through 14 million scans. It was then categorized by county and internet service provider (ISP). The different ISP data was calculated to provide an overall county average. Then, the county was color coded based on the average download and upload speed. Red being the worst, green being the best.
The map is viewable here.
Please understand, the county average is just that — an average. The average does not mean customers do not get higher speeds. It does mean, for everyone who is getting a faster than average speed, there is someone getting a slower than average speed.
There are several fascinating components to the map, including the various ISPs listed. The ISP names are obtained through a third party database, where the ISP registers the IP address of their customers.
Rural communities included satellite and cellphone ISPs. While larger communities, included hospital and university networks, and government entities such as the United States Department of Justice.
Not only can users pinpoint what ISPs are used in each area, but they can compare the download and upload speeds for each.
After the data was collected, analyzed, and the bandwidth map was created, PC Pitstop generated a Facebook ad campaign focusing on internet speeds nationwide. The ad was spread throughout the nation, and engagement was phenomenal. Over 151,000 Facebook users engaged in our ad. This included thousands of shares and over 1,100 comments.
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