According to Engadget the city of Olympia has the highest average download speed in the USA of 21Mbps, second is a tie between New York and Seattle with 11.7Mbps. Why the massive discrepancy? What is it about Olympia that allows it to have nearly double the download speed of the cities in second?
The big cities are probably dragged down by a bunch of low-cost, low-speed connections that impact their statistical averages.
It’s the water.
I will try to find more out Olympia for you but it probably houses some massive data centers that need the internet infrastructure so it comes up first. It is in the right location for it being so close to Microsoft Headquarters among others. The fastest download speeds anywhere in the U.S. probably aren’t in a city. The major internet providers often use smaller areas for test sites of new technology so you will probably find that the fastest available commercial service anywhere is in some small town in Texas or something. Much faster technologically is always waiting in the wings but it takes time for it to scale up and spread.
Here is a two year old news story about Olympia trying to get a huge data center so it is probably related:
http://crosscut.com/blog/crosscut/19024/The-state-s-new-data-center:-wait-just-a-minute!/
For comparison, I looked up the fastest residential internet speed in the US. Olympia and everyone else are about to be dusted by Chatanooga, TN. They will have about 50 times the average internet speed available at 1 gigabit per second soon as part of a test rollout. Most people won’t want to pay for it but it is there for subscribers in that area.
I would guess that a sizable amount of the internet usage in town comes from the state government apparatus (and the Evergreen State College), which are likely to have T1 lines.
…and a lot more.
As a resident of Olympia, I can say from my own experiences that my internet connection IS pretty dang fast.