There’s nothing like the final seconds of a great basketball game. The squeak of custom shoes on the court, the hush of the crowd as that final free throw nears the basket. If you’re streaming the NCAA Basketball Championship over your school’s network, the speed of your connection determines whether you’re cheering in time with the rest of the world or if you have to wait a few agonizing moments longer to see if you made it to the next round.
The rules of the game
Examining Speedtest data on schools that made the Sweet 16, we checked download and upload speeds on the school’s network over the last 90 days. That includes desktop tests using our website and mobile tests taken over Wi-Fi. What we found is that being a top seed doesn’t guarantee you have fast internet.
Player of the year
There’s no debate that North Carolina brings it with amazing download and upload speeds. We know North Carolina’s tech sector is booming, but we did not know how much that has benefitted the Tar Heels. The internet is so fast that even if every single student at UNC Chapel Hill decides to stream the next game on their individual devices, buffering would not be a problem.
The Zags and Wolverines are in enviable shape for speeds too.
Ready for a rebound
The Boilermakers and Bruins are in a sweet spot to overtake the faster schools next year. With speeds like these, we’d expect students at Purdue and UCLA to have no trouble keeping up with the game, even in HD streaming.
Warming up
The (Arizona) Wildcats, Mountaineers, Badgers, Ducks and Bulldogs have solid download and upload speeds. We can’t say what Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Oregon and Butler have planned in terms of infrastructure upgrades in the near future, but students at these schools will probably be happy with the speeds they’re getting for at least the next year or two.
Delay of game
The slowest downloads we saw came from the Gamecocks, Jayhawks, Bears, Gators and (Kentucky) Wildcats. Let’s be real, though, we can’t cite any of the schools above for delay of game, because even Kentucky’s “slowest” download speed beats the US’s 70.01 Mbps average download speed over fixed broadband in the past thirty days.
We can say that the internet is an essential educational tool. While some of these schools are in good shape now, they’ll need to keep boosting their speeds to keep up with their rivals — both in terms of internet speeds and to recruit the best students and players. So we hope South Carolina, Kansas, Baylor, Florida and Kentucky turn their attention to their internet infrastructure soon (but maybe not before the final game).
On the bench
We’re sad to say we benched Xavier because we didn’t have enough tests to give you reliable data. If you want to see Xavier (or any other school) ranked next time we peek at collegiate speeds, take a Speedtest on your school’s network.
Until then, enjoy the madness!
Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.
