Internet in Española is also ‘low and slow’

SANTA FE — Española knows about “low and slow” when it comes to low riders. Turns out, the same phrase applies to the internet in the city that bills itself as “The Low Rider Capital of the World.”

Española rides really low in internet speeds. According to a recent study that measured internet speeds in 2,359 cities in the United States, Española has the third slowest in the country.

HighSpeedInternet.com on Wednesday released results of its report based on 2 million speed tests

conducted on its website.

The average speed in Española was 7.7 mbps (megabits per second), better than only Stowe, Vermont, which registered at 6.7 mbps, and Sylva, North Carolina, which has the distinction of having the slowest internet speeds in the country, an average of 6.5 mbps.

HighSpeedInternet.com did not provide the Journal with the rank of other New Mexico cities, but it did list the average download speeds for a dozen of them.

Just three had average speeds above the nationwide average of 50.2 mbps: Farmington (68.1), Clovis (56.5) and Las Cruces (52.7).

Santa Fe was just below the nationwide average, with an average speed of 46.9 mbps. Albuquerque came in at 34.5 mbps.

“Internet speeds depend on a lot of things, including your internet provider’s infrastructure and plan availability in the area,” HighSpeedInternet.com’s Rebecca Lee Armstrong said in an email to the Journal North.

At the other end of the spectrum, Bayside, New York, has the fastest internet speed in the country, at 100.8 mbps, followed by Longmont, Colorado, (100.5) and Somerset, New Jersey (97.6).

The study notes that some households have gigabit internet, which is fast enough to stream movies on 20 different devices at the same time, while others barely have enough bandwidth to stream a single YouTube video.

The states with the fastest average internet speeds were Maryland, at 65.02 mbps, followed by New Jersey (59.58) and Delaware (59.08).

The states with the slowest average speeds were Alaska (17.03), Mississippi (24.77) and Idaho (25.30).

HighSpeedInternet.com said New Mexico ranked 40th among states, but it did not provide the average speed.