Comcast's Brian Roberts: Shouldn't Be "Ashamed" of U.S. Broadband

There’s no reason to concerned about the quality of broadband service in the U.S., Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said Wednesday at the Code Conference.

“I don’t think we should be ashamed of where we are with broadband at all,” Robert said, in response to a question about why Internet access here isn’t better.

Comcast* is the country’s largest wired broadband Internet provider and will get bigger if regulators allow the company to acquire Time Warner Cable. Plenty of people would disagree with Roberts, arguing that service is too expensive, too slow and not available in enough rural areas. The U.S. currently ranks 31st globally in Ookla’s rolling Net Index, with average speeds of 24.43 Mbps. The global average is 18.5 Mbps. (Hong Kong ranks fastest at 80.49 Mbps.)

That’s one of the reasons why people (and regulators) have been so interested in Google’s new gigabit service, which has rolled out in a handful of areas in the U.S.

* Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit is an investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’s parent company.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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