The Fastest Internet Providers 2023 | HighSpeedInternet.com (2023)

While big providers like Verizon Fios and Xfinity topped the list of fastest national providers, several regional and local providers also stood out for their fast speeds.

Over the past 12 months, the fastest regional carrier (i.e. any carrier serving less than five states) is WeLink. This is based on the results of our speed test tool taken between January 9, 2022 and January 9, 2023.

Based in Lehi, UT, WeLink is a fiber internet provider serving a handful of cities across the United States. The other providers on this list are member-owned Internet co-ops serving populations in rural and smaller urban areas in parts of the South.

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With the Internet becoming an important part of everyday life, the federal government has put pressure on Internet Service Providers to do better. In the summer of 2022, Jessica Rosenworcel, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an official call to raise federal minimum speeds for broadband Internet.

Currently, the FCC (the federal agency charged with regulating Internet policy) defines broadband Internet as any connection with a minimum download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 3 Mbps. But in July 2022, citing increased demand for fast internet following the COVID-19 pandemic, Rosenworcel called for this minimum to be increased to 100 Mbps download speeds and 20 Mbps upload speeds.1

Are US ISPs equipped to consistently meet proposed benchmarks? We took a look at five years of speed test data to see.

Despite the significant advances that Internet service providers have made in recent years, most Americans are still not getting speeds of 100 Mbps or more. According to our speed test data,32% of users get download speeds of 100 Mbps or faster.

That's three times as many users as in 2018, when just over 10% of internet users scored such fast speeds in our speed test. Clearly, there's still plenty of room for ISPs to improve their speeds before most Americans reach the benchmarks proposed by the FCC.

Interestingly, as the chart below shows, our data suggests that a large number of users are still getting download speeds of 25 Mbps or slower. However, enough users get speeds close to 100 Mbps or higher than that number, which raises the average. In addition, although very few Internet users achieve speeds of 500 Mbps or more, these cases also increase the overall average.

Based on our data, users have seen a particularly dramatic increase in speeds between the years 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. These numbers are not surprising, considering the pandemic was in full swing in March 2020, requiring unprecedented numbers of Internet users to seek faster speeds to support remote work and school.

The increase in the number of users with speeds of 100 Mbps or higher slowed down in 2021 and 2022. But if you filter the data by specific providers, the increase in users with speeds of 100 Mbps in much more dramatic terms.

The results of our speed test suggest thatFiber internet providers saw some of the biggest gains in speeds.. Windstream and Frontier, which offer a combination of fiber optic and DSL internet services, saw the biggest increase in users with 100 Mbps speeds between 2018 and 2022. These higher numbers reflect how fiber internet providers have generally moved away outdated services like DSL in favor of building their fiber networks.

Cable providers such as Mediacom and Cox have also shown dramatic increases in the number of users with speeds of 100 Mbps or more.

Most notably, T-Mobile has seen a 173% increase between 2019 and 2022. T-Mobile launched its 5G home internet service in 2019 and availability has expanded tremendously since then, a development that has earned the provider top marks. in our annual report.customer satisfaction survey.

Interestingly, some fiber internet providers (most notably Google Fiber, MetroNet and AT&T) showed much smaller gains. However, that's because these carriers were already offering speeds of 100 Mbps or more to a large number of users to begin with. In 2018, more than a third of Google Fiber and AT&T speed tests showed speeds of 100 Mbps or greater. Those numbers have only grown in the years since, with up to 60% of carrier speed test users now getting speeds in this range.

Satellite Internet providers are a different story. Together,very few satellite internet users get speeds of 100 Mbps or fasterbecause the bandwidth of the satellite itself is extremely limited.

Starlink, the much-talked-about satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX company, gets the most users with download speeds of 100 Mbps or higher. However, it is telling that Starlink has actually seen a decline in the number of users getting these speeds between 2020 and 2022, possibly due to the provider expanding its availability and facing new challenges to serve more users.

While you can do a lot online with a small amount of bandwidth, most Internet users end up needing speeds of 100 Mbps or higher to serve as a buffer while multitasking online and sharing their Wi-Fi connection. with others. The more devices, activities, and users you have at the same time, the faster your speeds will be.

A 100 Mbps internet plan isn't the fastest you can get, it's pretty much average. But for many users, the 100Mbps download speeds offer enough headroom to handle bandwidth-intensive tasks with minimal slowdowns or glitches. In comparison, 25Mbps download speeds are better suited for someone who lives alone or in a small house and spends less time streaming or video calling.

• Conveniently share the same Wi-Fi with three or more users
• Make video calls and stream movies on four or more Wi-Fi devices at the same time
• Stream 4K/UHD video across multiple monitors
• Download or upload a 1.5 GB file in two minutes
• Organize live streams

We measure ISP Internet speeds using our owninternet speed test. Millions of Internet users take our test every year, and we recalculate the results every three months to generate an Integrated Speed ​​Score (ISS) for the best performing ISPs.

We calculate ISS by adding 90% of a provider's average download speed to 10% of a provider's average upload speed, a combination that reflects the relative importance of these different speeds to user needs.

Most ISPs only advertise download speed as the default for Internet speed as a whole. We also factor in upload speeds because it's important to consider as internet users are increasingly reliant on upload bandwidth for Zoom, live streaming, and social media.

For this edition of our report, we've also pulled data from 17 of the top internet service providers since 2018 to analyze internet speed trends over time. For each year, we looked at the number of tests that fell into specific speed ranges: 25-99 Mbps, 100-499 Mbps, 500-999 Mbps, and 1000 Mbps and faster.