Which cities have the fastest Internet in America?

To attract tech jobs to your city, it certainly helps to have high performing broadband.

Pando Networks took a look at which big cities in the United States (with populations over 500,000) have the fastest Internet based on average download speeds, in 2011. The company measured the download speed of millions of the company's games that were downloaded last year -- the company says it gets more than 200 million each year.

Here are the cities with the fastest download speeds:

1. Austin

2. San Francisco

3. Boston

4. Seattle

5. New York

6. Baltimore

7. Washington, D.C.

8. Philadelphia

9. Louisville

10. Chicago

Not surprisingly, the cities that have the highest download speeds are also cities with strong tech reputations. Austin came in at 841 kilobytes per second, followed by San Francisco at 828 KBps, Boston at 827 KBps, Seattle at 805 KBps and New York at 787 KBps. On the other end, El Paso, Texas had the slowest average speed amongst big cities at 483 KBps.

It's worth noting, however, that the average download speeds measured in this study aren't all that impressive. Compared to a study earlier this year by Ookla, the fastest broadband company, Comcast, recorded an average speed of more than 2,000 KBps.

Photo: MikeRastiello/Flickr

[Via TechCrunch]

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com