Ookla, the global leader in independent broadband testing, has completed a study of all ISPs’ average download speeds in 2011 and found that throughout the year the six fastest ISPs were Comcast, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable, and Insight Communications. According to the report, Comcast and Charter were found to have an average download speed of 17.19 Megabits per second. Cablevision ranked third at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at fourth at 15.74 Mbps, Time Warner placed fifth at 14.41 Mbps and Insight followed in at sixth at 14.22 Mbps.

Craig Moffett, a senior analyst with Sanford Bernstein, told Multichannel News that cable’s rule over the broadband dominion won’t be ending anytime soon. “As more people are served by higher-speed connections,” said, “more and more applications are evolving to take advantage of them. Customers with lower-speed connections are increasingly being forced to upgrade to higher speed connections… or be left behind.”

In other words, you get movin’ so fast that you can’t slow yourself down.

Verizon was a stand-alone among telco and DSL providers in being the only non-MSO that managed to hold a candle to the cable provider’s broadband speed. Verizon was clocked as having an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps. Other than that, its telco contemporaries and DSL providers, as a comparison, were moving at not-quite-corpse speed. AT&T, for example, averaged a download speed as 4.40 Mbps and Qwest Communications averaged 6.34 Mbps.

Stepping down from a cable modem these days to a telco or DSL provider would probably feel like running into a quicksand trap for many users, especially if the difference is going to be as low as 25% of the download speed you’re used to.

It seems that the high speed dominance of multiple system operators isn’t that big of a secret to Internet users as as Comcast and Time Warner are already the top two worldwide MSOs with 22,360,000 and 12,109,000 subscribers, respectively. Or, alternately, if you’re already tethered to one of these MSOs and were holding out on some impossibly faster ISP out there, well, sorry – you’re not gonna get much faster Internets anytime in the near future.

This morning Google announced their purchase of Motorola Mobility. At $12.5 billion, it is their largest acquisition ever. Also announced today, after a swirl of rumors, was the acquisition of Insight Communications by industry giant Time Warner Cable.

This means that the nation’s second largest cable provider is purchasing the ninth for $3 billion. Time Warner Cable will add about 750,000 customers to their current base of about 12 million. Insight, which serves areas in Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio has 537,000 high-speed internet subscribers and 679,000 cable video subscribers.

According to a press release -

Time Warner Cable believes that, after incurring onetime costs and capital expenditures, it will create annual cost efficiencies of approximately $100 million through programming expense savings and other cost reductions. The company expects to realize the bulk of the savings within two years of closing. Furthermore, with Insight’s digital conversion and DOCSIS 3.0 rollout behind it, Time Warner Cable expects Insight will have lower capital requirements of 10%-12% of revenues upon completion of the acquisition.

How are people responding to this merger on the interwebs? The feedback on Twitter is mixed, but a definite majority seem to be less than thrilled.

While it’s true that any large company is going to have its share of negative feedback, it seems like Time Warner Cable receives a little more criticism than other companies. Like Verizon, Time Warner Cable’s customer service is sort of a long-running joke on the internet.

A quick scan of any complaints board or consumer advocate website will yield plenty of posts about the way Time Warner handles customers. “Worst Customer Service Ever!” is not an uncommon post title. The newest release from the American Customer Satisfaction Index gives Time Warner a score of 59, which is tied for the industry low. The ACSI has been reporting yearly on consumer’s impressions of companies since 1994.

Consumerist has been holding their “Worst Company is America” Tournament for 6 years and this year Time Warner Cable made it all the way to the sweet 16, getting edged out by BP in that match-up. They pick the entrants in that contest based on nominations from readers.

Of course, Insight Customers have their fair share of complaints. And most Insight customers that are unhappy about this acquisition are not basing their opinions on first-hand experience with Time Warner, but more on what they’ve heard. This tweet might sum things up quite nicely -

Is all of this internet chatter about Time Warner unwarranted? Or is there some truth to it? What are your thoughts about the acquisition? Let us know in the comments.

YouTube’s analytics program, Insight, originally featured information on:

• how many people have viewed your video
• what day of the week you get the most views
• where people live who are watching your video
• insight into popularity of your video

Now they’ve added

a new demographics tab that displays view count information broken down by age group (such as ages 18-24), gender, or a combination of the two, to help you get a better understanding of the makeup of your YouTube audience.

Now before privacy advocates get all het up, the information is given to video owners “in anonymous and aggregate form, based on the birth date and gender information that users share with us when they create YouTube accounts.” (Okay, privacy advocates, go ahead and get het up now. We know you’re going to anyway.)

Another new feature will show the total number of views on all your videos, as well as “your relative popularity on YouTube compared to other users, based on geographic location.”

Insight information is still located under Account > My Videos > Insight. Google says that video owners have already begun modifying their uploading habits (and I’m sure the content they’ve produced) based upon Insight’s popularity information. I’m sure that this will only continue that trend. And you know how I feel about data .

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