Computer users in Iowa are waiting longer than people in most states to download material. Jeffrey Rechenbach, with the Communications Workers of America, conducted a report on the matter. He says, out of the 50 states, Iowa ranks 47th in terms of internet connection speeds.
Rechenbach says it takes Iowans much longer to download a movie compared to people in the top-ranked state of Rhode Island. “If you’re in Rhode Island, the movie would take about 45 minutes to an hour to download,” Rechenbach explains, “in Iowa, that same movie might take two hours.” The report may be a factor in companies considering a move to Iowa.
“If you can’t deliver high speed networks, you’re going to have a hard time doing business,” Rechenbach says. Internet speeds are relatively slow across the entire country. The report claims the U.S. had the fastest download speed 10 years ago, but now ranks 16th in the world.
“The biggest problem is we have no policy dealing with what we want to see happen in terms of the internet in this country,” Rechenbach claims, “every single other industrialized nation in the world has a policy for encouraging and building out high speed networks.”
The CWA report involved collected data from 80,000 computer users. The report claims Iowa’s average download speed is 1.2 megabits per second. The national average is 1.9, while the average in Japan is 61 megabits per second. More information is available at www.SpeedMatters.org .