Bay State places ninth in survey of Internet speeds

In a survey, Nevada had the fastest Internet-access speeds in the country. (istockphoto.com)

The surfing is wicked good in Massachusetts.

Web surfing, that is.

In December, PCMag.com measured the speeds of Internet service providers across the United States and ranked Massachusetts as the ninth-fastest Net state in the nation.

According to the study, the average Web browser in Massachusetts sees speeds of about 695 kilobits per second.

Nevada had the fastest Internet speeds, with users averaging 781 kilobits per second.

In New England, only Connecticut outpaced Massachusetts, with 716 kbps - good enough for fifth place.

New Mexico placed dead last in the nation, with users accessing the Internet at about 322 kbps, much slower than even in Hawaii, which ranked 49.

Rhode Island was listed at 33, with 516 kbps. Maine was ranked 40, with 427 kbps, while poor Vermont fell all the way to 47, with 391 kbps. New Hampshire placed 17th, with 615 kbps.

Perhaps even some political trends could be drawn from the study. Of the 10 fastest Internet states, only Oklahoma and Nebraska voted Republican in last month's presidential election, and just four states in the top 20 are "red" states.

The study also pitted Internet service providers against each other. While it determined that Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic service is the fastest overall Internet service, the magazine also sought to solve this question: DSL or Cable? It found that cable connections were 47 percent faster than DSL.

Cablevision's Optimum Online, which serves New York City, Westchester County, and Long Island in New York, as well as parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, proved to be the fastest cable service, averaging impressive speeds of 839 kbps.

Even the slowest cable provider, Earthlink at 565 kbps, was faster than some DSL providers.

For companies that serve Massachusetts, Comcast Corp.'s average of 750 kbps ranked it the third-fastest cable Internet service provider, behind Cablevision and Cox. RCN's cable Internet service ranked seventh, at 698 kbps. For DSL, Verizon ranked fourth in the nation, with 469 kbps, behind AT&T, CenturyTel, and FrontierNet.

Verizon FiOS was more than twice as fast as its DSL service, with 931 kbps.

To figure out speeds, PCMag used a program called SurfSpeed, which readers can download for free at PCMag.com. The program accesses pages from several popular websites like Google and AOL and measures how quickly users are able to download data. The magazine said it used 200,000 individual reader tests.

Published by Ziff Davis Media, PCMag.com is the Web presence of the former PC Magazine, which had been in print since 1982. In November, the magazine said it would become an online-only publication.

A Globe test of SurfSpeed, a WiFi connection in Brighton, using Comcast's cable service, averaged a whopping 1170 kbps over four consecutive tests. Take that, New Mexico.