Broadband speeds fall in dozens of big US cities during pandemic

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Home-Internet download speeds have fallen during the COVID-19 pandemic in dozens of the biggest US cities as millions of Americans stay home due to school and business closures. However, typical download speeds remain high enough to support normal broadband-usage patterns, with the vast majority of cities still above the Federal Communications Commission's 25Mbps standard.

In 88 of the 200 most populous US cities, Internet users "experienced some degree of network degradation over the past week compared to the 10 weeks prior," BroadbandNow said in a report released Wednesday. Of those, 27 cities suffered speed reductions of at least 20 percent.

New York City speeds fell by 24 percent, with median download speeds down to 51.93Mbps-still enough for bandwidth-intensive services like streaming video. While New York City has been hit hard by the spread of the novel coronavirus, the city's broadband experience isn't replicated everywhere. Seattle, where the virus is also rampant, hasn't suffered a drop in download speeds, though Seattle's speeds were already below New York City's. Seattle's most recent median-download speed was 27.1Mbps, while Seattle's median results ranged from 20.8Mbps to 29.1Mbps in the previous 10 weeks.

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