Chapel Hill has second fastest internet in the world

A recent report named Chapel Hill as the town with the second fastest Internet in the world, but some find flaws in the evaluation.

Senior Shaddi Hasan, co-founder of the Campus Y group Technology Without Borders, said that the report could be misleading.

“If the University was taken out of the picture, the data would be quite different,” he said.

He said that he thinks the high-speed data comes from the University’s Internet speed rather than the town of Chapel Hill’s.

Sure enough, U.S. cities comprised six of the top 10 listed, and each one is the location of a well-known university. Cities in Taiwan, Great Britain and two in South Korea took the remaining four spots.

Akamai, a company that handles web interactions for companies compiled “The State of the Internet” report for the fourth quarter of 2009.

Broadband, defined as Internet that delivers at least 768 kilobits per second, is considered high-speed by the Federal Communications Commission.

Approximately 89 percent of Orange County residents have access to broadband internet, according to a map from the planning department.

The report lists the town’s average measured connection speed as 17,483 kilobits per second.

“I don’t know that the city has that kind of Internet speed,” said Bob Avery, chief informational officer for the town’s business management department.

“I know that our town connection for municipal purposes is not a high-speed connection.”

Avery said that he does not know how the report will affect the town’s application to get Google’s free fiber-optics installment tested in the town, but he said he thinks it is still needed in the area.

“If you have a business that can benefit, then the ability for people to connect to your resources and get information from them depends on high-speed connection,” he said.

The top-ranked city was Berkeley, Calif., where a branch of the University of California is located.



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