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By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
September 13 -- OTLATCH, Idaho — Barry Ramsay, who owns a small manufacturing company here between two mountains, remembers the day his Internet connection crashed for several hours. Work crews had to ride up in snowmobiles to discover the problem.
“They said that bears had been rubbing against the towers,” Mr. Ramsay said. In this mountainous state, where some connections depend on line of sight, even snow and fog can disrupt the signals. “These are the kind of problems you probably don’t have in an urban area,” he said.
And, according to a new study, they are among the problems that have earned Idaho an unfortunate distinction: it had the slowest Internet speeds in the country earlier this year for residential customers who were downloading things like games — a “dismal” average of 318 kilobytes per second.
Translation: In Idaho, it would take you 9.42 seconds to download a standard music file compared with 3.36 seconds in Rhode Island, the state with the fastest average speeds, at 894 kilobytes per second.
The slowest city, by the way, was also in Idaho: In Pocatello, it would take nearly 12 seconds to download that music file, according to the study by Pando Networks, a company that helps consumers accelerate downloads. In the nation’s fastest city, Andover, Mass., a Boston suburb, it would take just over one second....
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/downloads-are-slowest-in-idaho-study-finds.html
Image source: The New York Times