Idaho has the slowest Internet speeds for residential customers in the country, while Rhode Island and other East Coast states have among the fastest.
Differences in download time between the cities with the fastest (Providence, RI) and slowest (Pocatello, ID) connections vary by an order of magnitude i.e. a multiple of ten. More like 12 times, in fact.
Oddly, Washington State has faster Internet connection speeds than California, and all other states west of the Mississippi River. I wonder why…?
* A related New York Times article is linked to the graphic.
Fault testing in the cloud
The impact of an Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud 2 outage (the product more commonly known as AWS EC2) is still unknown. It will be interesting to do some post-situation analysis, and see what the effect was on global web traffic. That is not possible at this time, as EC2 remains off-line.
Many sites are unaffected of course.
Happily, a single cloud provider has not become indispensable for the internet. This should reinforce the viewpoint that alternative provider services, at least two or three, are always to be encouraged. The BBC provides a nice summary of the situation.
Amazon fault takes down websites
Scores of well-known websites have been unavailable for large parts of Thursday because of problems with Amazon’s web hosting service. Foursquare, Reddit and Quora were among the sites taken offline by the glitch. No reason has so far been given for the outage.
Amazon’s cloud service last hit the headlines when it decided to stop hosting a mirrored version of the Wikileaks website. However, at this stage, there is nothing to suggest that the most recent outage was related to the Wikileaks controversy. Read more at www.bbc.co.uk
