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The United States dropped seven spots during the past year to finish nineteenth in global Digital Quality of Life rankings from Surfshark, a provider of cybsecurity technology. The drop in the U.S. rankings occurred, despite the country’s gains in broadband speeds and adoption.

Broadband speeds are one of five categories that Surfshark considered in making its rankings. The U.S. finished in the top six out of 121 counties studied in three out of the five categories.

The country finished second in e-government, fifth in e-infrastructure (which is the broadband adoption category) and sixth in Internet quality (which is the speed category). But it was forty-third in e-security and thirty-second in affordability.

The fifth annual ratings by Surfshark assessed 121 countries accounting for 92% of the global population.

Digital Quality of Life Rankings

Key results concerning the United States:

• The United States surpassed Canada (22nd) and Australia (30th) in digital quality of life.
• The United States’ internet quality is 50% higher than the global average and ranks sixth in the world.
• The United States’ fixed internet speed (247 Mbps) has improved by 19% compared to last year, while mobile speed (144 Mbps) has improved by 25%.
• Just like last year, the United States performed worst in the e-security pillar (43rd), which would need to improve by 46% to match the best-ranking country (Belgium).
• The United States took first place in North America.

The high point for the U.S., of course, was its second place finish in e-government. Even that has a negative element: The U.S was first last year but was passed by Singapore.

Surfshark says that Internet quality in the U.S. was 50% higher than the global average and that the fixed Internet average speed was 247 Mbps. That was not too far behind that of Singapore, which topped the category at 300 Mbps. The U.S. mobile Internet average was 144 Mbps, less than half of the UAE’s leading score of 310 Mbps.

“Compared to Canada, the United States’ mobile internet is 25% faster, while fixed broadband is 9% faster,” Surfshark said. “Since last year, mobile internet speed in the United States has improved by 25%, while fixed broadband speed has grown by 19%.”

Surfshark found that Americans have to work 51 minutes per month to afford fixed broadband and over an hour and a half to afford mobile Internet.

The top ten finishers overall were France, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Estonia, Austria, Switzerland and Singapore.

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AT&T has retained the top spot on Vertical Systems Group’s (VSG) mid-2023 U.S. Carrier Ethernet Leaderboard, which measures market leadership based on market share results. AT&T replaced Lumen in the top spot at the end of last year.

 Lumen, Spectrum Enterprise, Verizon, Comcast Business and Cox Business are the other providers at the top of the Leaderboard––in the same order since the year-end 2022 report. To be in this group, providers must have a 4% or more share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market.

The Leaderboard has two other tiers: Challenge and Market Player. Altice USA, Cogent (including Sprint assets), Frontier, GTT, Windstream and Zayo (in alphabetical order) are in the Challenge tier, which means they each have a market share between 1% to 4%.

Overall, according to VSG, Ethernet port growth was up, but could change in the near future.

“DIA connectivity for cloud computing and SD-WAN/SASE networks lifted U.S. Ethernet port growth in the first half of 2023,” VSG Principal and Co-founder Rick Malone, said. “However, despite the resiliency of the Ethernet market, several providers are preparing for port reductions in the future as customers opt for alternative service technologies.”

Here are other highlights from the report:

• Dedicated Internet/Cloud Access (DIA) accounted for the most new Ethernet service installations in the first half of the year. DIA was driven by ongoing enterprise migration to cloud services, managed SD-WAN, secure access service edge (SASE) and hybrid WANs.
• Ethernet access to VPN installations is declining as MPLS customers transition to SD-WANs.
• Demand for 100+ Gbps Ethernet connectivity is evolving as customers upgrade from lower-speed Ethernet services. Customers also are considering wavelength or dark fiber service alternatives.
• Ethernet service providers have seen supply chain challenges ease.
• AT&T, Lumen and Verizon have MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet (CE) certification. This certification means that a provider can support MEF 3.0 standard services, technologies and APIs.

The Market Player tier includes all providers in the sector that have port shares below 1%. Some of the companies in this sector include: ACD, Alaska Communications, Altafiber, BT Global Services, Centracom, Intelsat, Logix Fiber Networks, NTT, Silver Star Telecom, TDS Telecom, US Signal, WOW!Business and Ziply Fiber.

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The largest cable, wireline phone and fixed wireless access (FWA) providers had a better second quarter this year than they had in the year-ago quarter, according to the Leichtman Research Group.

These companies had a net gain of about 840,000 subscribers during this year’s second quarter, compared to about 700,000 in the year-ago quarter.

FWA and 5G home Internet services from T-Mobile and Verizon had another very good quarter with about 893,000 new subscribers, which beat the 815,000 net additions in the year-ago quarter. Overall, the category has added more than 800,000 net additions during five consecutive quarters.

In all, the top broadband companies ended the quarter with 112,894,214 subscribers. Leichtman Research found that in total 840,733 subscribers were added. Highlights of the quarter:

• The top cable companies added about 10,000 subscribers this year, compared to a loss of about 60,000 in the year-ago quarter.
• The top wireline phone companies lost about 60,000 total broadband subscribers similar to the approximately 60,000 net losses in the year ago quarter.
• Wireline telcos had about 450,000 net additions via fiber and about 510,000 non-fiber net losses.

“Top broadband providers added about 840,000 subscribers in 2Q 2023, led by another strong quarter from fixed wireless,” Leichtman Research Group president and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman said in a press release. “Fixed wireless services have acquired over 800,000 net adds in each of the past five quarters, accounting for about 4.45 million net adds in that period.”

Cable companies ended the quarter with 76,240,785 subscribers. The top five:

• Comcast: 32,305,000 (subscribers at the end of the second quarter of 20230; 19,000 net losses
• Charter: 30,586,000;   77,000 net adds
• Altice: 4,576,100; 36,600 net losses
• Cable One: 1,057,900; 5,100 net losses
• Breezeline: 680,785; 6,734 losses

Wireline phone companies ended the quarter with 30,715,429 subscribers. The top seven:

• AT&T: 15,304,000 (subscribers at the end of the second quarter of 20230; 41,000 net losses
• Verizon: 7,562,000; 34,000 net gain
• Lumen: 2,909,000; 72,000 net losses
• Frontier: 2,865,000; 2,000 net adds
• Windstream: 1,175,000; no change
• TDS; 523,600; 8,200 net adds
• Consolidated: 376,829; 6,967 net adds

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Over 150 million (157 million) 5G connections were added worldwide between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, reaching a total of 1.2 billion connections worldwide, according to research from Omdio and 5G Americas. North America now has 133 million 5G connections and 503 million LTE connections, the researchers said.

The rate of adoption – which a press release referred to as a “surge” – will enable the sector to reach 1.9 billion connections by the end of this year and 6.8 billion by the end of 2027. If so, the annual growth rate will be almost 1 billion connections.

The 5G penetration rate in North America is almost 36%, with 14 million new connections so far this year. Connections are projected to reach 601 million by the end of 2027.

“Initial 5G deployments have laid a strong foundation and now operators are focused on standalone 5G and beyond to advance 5G and bring about further innovations,” Omdia Principal Analyst Kristin Paulin said in the press release.

“By 2025, 5G is expected to be the dominant mobile technology in North America. And, in the four years from the end of 2023 to the end of 2027, Omdia forecasts 5G in North America will grow 184% to reach 601 million subscriptions.”

The press release cites TeleGeography and 5G Americas assessment that as of June 15 there now are 267 commercial 5G networks worldwide, including 14 in North America and 28 in the Caribbean and Latin America. There are 703 LTE networks worldwide, including 17 in North America and 129 in the Caribbean and Latin America.

The number of 5G networks worldwide is expected to reach 386 by end of this year and 413 by the end of 2025.

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A new testing lab in Burlington, MA aims to help ensure interoperability of open radio access network (O-RAN) equipment.

The lab, to be known as the Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC), was established by the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things (WIoT) at Northeastern University. It will operate within the Open6G Hub.

The OTIC has been approved by the O-RAN ALLIANCE with the official designation of “North American OTIC in the Boston Area (Northeastern University).”

O-RAN Testing Lab

The OTIC will provide industry, academia and the federal government with testing, certification and badging capabilities.

“It will ensure multi-vendor interoperability, perform compliance and performance testing and validate end-to-end control logic,” said WIoT in a press release. “OTIC also will test artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to control open and programmable cellular networks.”

The OTIC will provide testing equipment and services to validate disaggregated base stations and RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs). This will include custom applications such as xApps and rApps. End-to-end intelligent applications will be tested against different commercial and open-stack implementations in emulated or over-the-air environments.  

The OTIC also will be a resource for the U.S. government. The Open6G Hub, within which the OTIC will operate, has funding from the Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, the Army Research Laboratory Cooperative Agreement and the National Science Foundation’s Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program.

“Northeastern’s Open6G is at the forefront of innovation in Open RAN testing, architectures, algorithms, software, and experimentation. Together with our partners, we are creating an innovation and testing ecosystem that will continue to serve the federal government, industry, and academia,” WIoT Director Tommaso Melodia said in a press release.