In addition to the best public education in the world, U. California-Berkeley now affords the city of Berkeley another distinction: the fastest Internet.
A report released last week by Akamai, a web hosting technology company whose clients include Hulu and Apple, ranked Berkeley’s broadband connection as the fastest in the world for the fourth quarter of 2009.
In the United States, Berkeley is followed by Chapel Hill, N.C., Stanford, Calif. and Durham, N.C.-all college towns, which the report states are some of the best connected in the nation.
College towns likely enjoy these higher measured speeds due to the high bandwidth connections available at the universities, said David Belson, director of market intelligence at Akamai, in an e-mail.
The high ranking is likely more representative of the campus, the report states, “as opposed to particularly high-speed consumer broadband services available to local residents.”
Jennifer Donovan, senior public relations manager for Akamai, said the company has 61,000 servers around the globe. The servers track about 20 percent of all Internet traffic every day by recording requests and determining how long files take to download.
UC Berkeley connects to the CalREN network, which is used for statewide research and education, according to Shelton Waggener, associate vice chancellor for information technology. He said in an e-mail that “high capacity is provided via multiple high bandwidth connections” to the network.
Waggener said the campus ensures the reliability of its Internet access by using two independent sets of connections. One set provides a total of 13 gigabits per second and another provides a total of 10 gigabits per second.
Should one of them fail, the other is capable of meeting campus demand on its own, Waggener said.
“Researchers, educators and students demand high-quality, high-speed network service for their research- and education-related activities,” Waggener said in the e-mail.
The report also states that college towns may have higher broadband speeds because “the speed of local consumer broadband offerings is potentially higher than average.”
UC Berkeley senior Jose Roberto Gonzalez Molina said he routinely uses the campus network due to his poor connection at home.
“I use AirBears all the time on campus,” he said. “I think it’s very, very reliable.”