(Credit: René Ramos; Alexander Spatari / Moment, RICHARD JONES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)
We've all experienced it: video calls that freeze mid-sentence and streaming movies that buffer just a little too long. For years, we here at PCMag considered raw internet speed to be the fix, and we dutifully crunched the numbers on upload and download speeds from hundreds of broadband internet service providers, tracking all the megabits traveling per second, to find the fastest services.
But even with great speeds, there are problems. There's a lack of internet in select areas. Prices can still be way too high. And customer satisfaction with ISPs is often behind even that of utilities, according to surveys from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. So we decided that data throughput (internet speed) alone isn’t enough to determine the overall quality of your ISP.
That’s why we’re in our third year of reporting not only the fastest but also the best ISPs. To manage that task, we take into account throughput data from the PCMag Speed Test, FCC information about coverage and pricing (provided by our data partner, BroadbandNow), and input on ISPs from our readership. We combine all these variables into a single, powerful metric: the PCMag Cumulative Broadband ISP Index. (Read our methodology for details.)
This holistic approach allows us to compare ISPs across the US with smaller providers that are limited to just one area or even one town. It’s not always apples-to-apples, so we also break things down by the major ISPs (defined below), ISPs overall, and ISPs in different regions of the country. This ensures you have the clearest picture possible when choosing your internet service
And you can be a part of this story next time. Take our Speed Test now to contribute data about your ISP. (Editor's Note: The PCMag Speed Test is provided by Ookla, which is owned by PCMag's parent company, Ziff Davis.)
The Best Major ISPs
We define a major ISP as a provider that has delivered more than one thousand tests on the PCMag Speed Test in the past year, has at least a million subscribers, and provides service across at least four US states. With that in mind, 21 ISPs made the cut last year; that number drops to 19 this time around.
That decrease is not surprising, given the trend of consolidation via mergers and acquisitions. For example, Charter—the owner of Spectrum, the second biggest ISP in the US—intends to buy Cox, the third-largest cable company in the country, to better combat Comcast’s Xfinity, the biggest of them all.
On the fiber side, AT&T is buying up all of Lumen’s mass-market fiber to expand its AT&T Fiber service; Verizon is buying Frontier to bolster the Fios Home Internet fiber service (despite having sold Frontier major swaths of wireline connections a decade ago); and massive mobile provider T-Mobile tip-toes directly into the fiber-to-the-home business this month after buying Lumos’ fiber (not to be confused with Lumen). Even Canadian ISPs are heading south—last year, Bell Canada teamed up with a private equity firm to buy Ziply Fiber in the Northwest.
There are also “new” ISPs out there, like the major fixed-wireless services using 5G—but most of them are from the same old brands doing 5G, specifically AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The latter two services, in particular, are among the fastest-growing ISPs in the US, thanks to how convenient they are to install. Some small regional mobile carriers are trying their hand at 5G home internet, like C Spire in Mississippi and UScellular, the fifth-largest cellular carrier in the US, which will soon be owned by T-Mobile.
No matter how you look at the data, there’s one major ISP that rises above the rest for the second year in a row. GFiber from Alphabet (Google's parent company) is on top again, thanks to amazing pricing and customer satisfaction (GFiber won our Readers’ Choice award earlier this year). The ISP is no slouch when it comes to speed either, although it did rank a little higher on our speed index in 2024. Among the major ISPs across all 50 states, GFiber has the highest PCMag Cumulative Broadband ISP Index, a 24.8 out of a possible 40.
We spoke at length with Trey Paul, a senior editor at our sister publication CNET, who covers ISPs extensively. He cites GFiber’s “great reputation," and adds, "The only thing we ever ding them for—and I use the word ding lightly—is simply the lack of availability.”
GFiber now reaches more than 30 cities. Our data partner, BroadbandNow, reports that GFiber is only available to 1.3% of the US, citing numbers from the FCC. However, Paul points out that the FCC’s numbers are “not gospel,” only the “best we have available to lean on.”
Where GFiber—whose base tier of service starts at one Gigabit per second (Gbps)—shines is pure value. “They give you a good price for that Gig,” Paul says, “and you get all the equipment.”
There are a number of differences between this year's and last year’s top 10 major ISPs. Verizon Fios Home Internet goes from fourth place to second, jumping above Xfinity. Frontier, meanwhile, jumps from ninth to fourth. Starlink returns to the top 10 in eighth, buoyed by its extensive coverage of the US and high reader satisfaction scores, and pulled down by its speed and price.
Another big change is a new player in the number 10 slot—a provider that is also this year’s Fastest Major ISP. Quantum Fiber is part of Lumen Technologies, which also owns the CenturyLink brand for DSL connections. Quantum Fiber is the fastest ISP among the major providers by a massive margin, even outpacing last year’s fastest, MetroNet, with speed indices of 621.5 vs. 367.5, respectively. Both are well ahead of GFiber for speed.
“It doesn’t surprise me that that Quantum Fiber came up pretty high on the speed list,” Paul says. “In most areas, its starting speed is 500Mbps.” He compares that favorably with AT&T Fiber, which begins at 300Mbps. In addition, Quantum Fiber has even more coverage reach (2.2% of the country) than GFiber (1.3%).
As noted above, Lumen is in the process of selling off all its mass-market fiber assets to AT&T by early 2026. Assuming the deal meets all the regulatory approvals, by this time next year, all those people currently experiencing Quantum Fiber’s stunning speed will likely be AT&T Fiber customers.
Skip through the years on the tabs in the chart above to see what kind of throughput it takes to earn the title of the fastest ISP.
The Best ISPs Overall
Last year, the list of qualifying ISPs (those delivering a minimum of 100 speed tests over the course of the year) included 84 providers; this year, there are only 79.
The top slots went to the types of ISPs we've learned over the years that people like the best: municipal fiber providers. Sometimes small communities deploy them, sometimes it's the local utility companies, but either way, in our Readers’ Choice surveys, we’ve seen time and again that they’re the ISPs people rate with the highest satisfaction, generally above a nine on a zero to 10 scale.
This year, two of them make the cut in the top three of our overall ISPs list. The top-rated is Pulse, the fiber service of Loveland, CO, near Denver. It only narrowly outranks GFiber. Pulse has a higher speed index, while GFiber beats it on the other measures. Still, Pulse is the winner thanks to the larger cumulative score.
The number three slot goes to Nextlight, an ISP in Longmont, another suburb of Denver. Both Pulse and Nextlight can partially attribute their wins to excellent reader satisfaction. Paul, coincidently, grew up in the area around Longmont. “That community, it’s about local support,” he says. “It’s my community utility: They know me, I know them. It’s not a big, faceless company. I feel that’s a huge motivating factor.”
Price helps the municipal ISPs here to a lesser extent—the two have vastly different price levels according to the data from BroadbandNow. But they rank close to each other in the price index—as do many of the ISPs in the chart overall—thanks to the very expensive services from others, particularly Starlink.
Our overall ISP winner last year, T-Mobile, doesn’t register in the Top 10 for 2025; nor does Verizon Wireless, which was in eighth place last year. Verizon broke out separate data on its 5G Home Internet service for the first time this year, so we didn't assign the price and coverage data of the big-three carriers' fixed-wireless services to their cellular services. You will, however, see Verizon 5G Home Internet appear in some regional charts below. The only coverage numbers we’re using nationally for the cellular services are from WhistleOut.
Starlink was number 10 on the overall ISPs list last year. This year, it's number six, owing its placement to reader satisfaction and, of course, the fact that it’s available to almost anyone, anywhere in the country. It has the highest coverage in the top 10, naturally, but according to BroadbandNow, it’s not as high as that of satellite competitor HughesNet. Still, the difference is negligible—just tenths of a percentage.
Paul thinks that the other existing satellite ISPs have tried to up their game to fight Starlink, but that “the real competition for Starlink will ultimately come from Jeff Bezos and [Amazon's] Project Kuiper.” When asked if it was too little, too late, he says, “I would have said yes two years ago, but now that Elon’s got the reputation he’s got, I think that people are going to be happy to be like, ‘Oh, there’s somewhere else I can go.’”
Back to the fiber players: GFiber remains in the number two slot, with ratings very similar to what it earned in 2024. Meanwhile, Verizon Fios Home Internet stays in fourth. Xfinity’s slip from third to fifth is due to the ascension of the municipal small fiber providers mentioned above.
That brings us to the fastest ISP in the country, period. For the fifth time, the winner is California-based Sonic. It was also our fastest in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2019.
Sonic ranks number 10 on the list of Best ISPs above, thanks to that speed, plus its extremely low price—assuming you can afford the highest tier of service. For all of our pricing, BroadbandNow divides the cost per month of the high tier by the Mbps download speed. In Sonic’s case, that’s 10 Gigs at $59.99 per month. That price for Sonic comes out to just over half a penny ($0.0059) per Mbps. (At its 1 Gig introductory tier, Sonic would cost $49.99, so we get $0.049, which is 8.4 times more money per Mbps for the slower service.)
Sonic’s PCMag Speed Index was 748.3 last year. This year, it has increased to 907.8. And that’s the median, not the average.
Paul says his colleague who reviewed Sonic was a “huge fan, again, with the idea that it’s a local company.” But he notes, as with any ISP, getting it is the issue. Location dictates access. “You could be on one side of the street and get fiber, and you could be on the other side of the street and you can’t,” Paul says. “But those that can get Sonic are certainly going to appreciate that it’s a flat rate and you get the fastest speed you can get.”
Other ultra-fast ISPs trying to keep up with similar speeds are fiber-based, such as Ezee Fiber, Fision by Hotwire, Bluepeak, Race Communications, and the aforementioned Quantum Fiber. Some appear below on the regional level, as they had enough responses (a minimum of 100 tests) even in smaller geographic areas.
The Best ISPs by US Region
There are four major regions dictated by the US Census Bureau (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), which the bureau breaks down even further, for a total of nine divisions in the country. You can see which broadband dominates in each by hovering over the different color states on the map. Click the tabs to see if the top ISP was different in your region in previous years.
Below is a deeper dive into each division to see which ISP is the best and/or the fastest in each.
Northeast States
This area has long been a Fios fiber stronghold, and these are repeat wins for Verizon in both the Best and Fastest categories for the New England area. Don’t let the logo rebranding with just “Verizon” make you think anything other than its fiber will suffice there—5G Home Internet didn’t have enough tests to make the New England results. Cable companies like Xfinity, Spectrum, Cox, and Astound (which all use a mix of coax and fiber anyway) also place well. The surprise here is T-Mobile. Even lacking scores for price and coverage, it manages to make the top 10.
Frontier’s fourth-place showing bodes well for Verizon, which will absorb Frontier’s 2.2 million fiber customers into its own network in a deal expected to close in early 2026.
Spectrum is second in speed, followed by Cox and Frontier. So, maybe Frontier’s number will drag down Fios’ median speeds next year. We shall see.
Last year, this three-state region belonged entirely to Optimum’s fiber service. Optimum came close this time, but Verizon Fios Home Internet was able to reclaim the top spot it took back in 2023, thanks to higher user satisfaction and better prices.
Other standouts include Starlink, which landed a spot in the top 10 thanks to its 98.1% coverage in this division and, of course, the standing it has with readers using the service, as based on our Readers’ Choice survey. Xfinity and Astound also placed well, coming in third and fourth, respectively.
Fios can’t beat Optimum Fiber’s speed, however. It’s the fastest in the area, period. Frontier has excellent numbers, taking second place, and localized fiber provider Greenlight Networks, found in New York’s Buffalo and Rochester areas, is third. Greenlight, it should be noted, is also expanding in Pennsylvania.
Midwest States
The top winners here are the same as last year. Spectrum wins again as the Best ISP in the division. MetroNet remains the fastest, holding a speed index near 500. Other standouts in the area include cable ISPs like Xfinity, Astound, and Armstrong. Starlink is fifth thanks to its high satisfaction and coverage combination. Though it doesn’t appear in the top 10, the ISP with our best pricing rating is FairlawnGig, the municipal ISP of Fairlawn, OH.
GFiber’s win for Best ISP for the West North Central is its third. It doesn’t have the very best scores for price or satisfaction, but it comes incredibly close. Best pricing in the region goes to Metronet, but it’s literally only fractions of a penny better. GFiber also has our best reader satisfaction level available for a multi-state ISP, a factor that helps it in the regions below as well.
GFiber does not have the best speed in the West North Central area—that award goes for the second year in a row to Allo, a fiber provider headquartered in Nebraska with service in over 50 cities. Last year, its speed index hit 401.1; this time it’s 490.9, crushing GFiber’s speed index of 340.1.
Southern States
This may be the part of the country with the biggest changes in ISP winners since last year. The South Atlantic states, stretching from Florida up to Maryland, now feature Verizon Fios Home Internet as the Best (last year it was GFiber) and apartment-dweller ISP Fision by Hotwire as the fastest (last year it went to Ting). Google’s ISP drops to second place in the best list, while Ting doesn’t even make the cut in 2025, as not enough Ting users used the PCMag Speed Test in the last year.
Fios isn’t the top-scoring ISP in any of our categories and is quite low on its coverage index. It’s only in a few of the states in this region: Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, plus parts of Washington, DC, outside of the city’s core. However, its low price and a reader rating of 8.4 keep it ahead of the rest.
Fision’s speed is almost matched by our national winner in that domain, Quantum Fiber; they are within 10 points of each other on the PCMag Speed Index. The top ISP in the region for coverage is Starlink, while the best for price is Frontier. Both make the top 10 list above.
Spectrum gets another repeat win here, staying just ahead of Xfinity, which is again in second place. Spectrum’s got the better coverage—the best in the region, in fact, earning a full 10 in our Coverage Index because it potentially serves 31.2% of the populace. It also has solid scores for speed and price. All of that adds up to the highest Cumulative Broadband ISP Index of the year, across all the divisions.
For faster speeds, though, users will want to turn to Cable One’s Sparklight. It serves all of the states here except Kentucky. Last year, Sparklight didn’t even have enough users to register, and the fastest trophy went to GFiber; this year, the two switch places, with Sparklight appearing and GFiber vanishing from the chart.
Meanwhile, the best price belongs to WOW!, which has a scattering of users in Alabama and Tennessee.
GFiber’s presence in the West South Central states is limited to Texas, particularly Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Its amazing satisfaction rating from our readers, partnered with great pricing for this state, is enough to nab it first place for a second time. Users outside of Texas and the cities above will want to consider Frontier or Optimum’s fiber, as they rank in second and third place, respectively.
That said, the true fastest in the region is also limited to certain buildings in select Texas towns because that’s how Fision by Hotwire operates: bringing excellent service to multi-dwelling units only. With a Speed Index of 913, it’s almost the fastest in this entire survey, though speed-demon ISPs like Ezee Fiber and Bluepeak aren’t far behind in this division.
Western States
GFiber is now the Best ISP for the Mountain division for the third consecutive year. Its price index and reader satisfaction numbers push it to the top of the list once again, despite the fact that its coverage score is weak. Amid these many Mountain states, GFiber’s availability is limited to Utah. Also, this region features national winners Pulse and Nextlight, but of course, you need to live near Denver to enjoy them. For those with cable options, Optimum and Xfinity have good services in many areas. For everyone in remote locales, fourth-place Starlink is available.
Last year, Pulse landed the Fastest ISP award for the Mountain region, but this year, it can’t quite keep up with Bluepeak, which has connections in Colorado (its headquarters is in Denver) and much more service in Wyoming.
Does this pairing seem familiar? You saw it above in the West South Central states. Thanks to their presence in California, GFiber and Fision now take the same titles in the Pacific states.
GFiber is the Best ISP for the area, thanks to locations in the Oakland/East Bay area, in addition to its Webpass fixed-wireless service in several other cities. As you’ve read many times above, GFiber isn’t the best in any one index, but it has highs for satisfaction and price that are almost impossible to beat when it garners even a semi-decent speed number.
Fision by Hotwire’s speed is blazing in the few places where it’s available—its 943.7 Speed Index is the fastest of any single regional ISP this year. It probably doesn’t hurt that, beyond the ISP’s three locations in California, that state also has a Fision Experience Center—an actual storefront that looks like a lounge just to try the service. (Fision operates other physical locations in North Carolina.)
Users outside of California have plenty of cable providers to choose from, including Xfinity, Astound, Spectrum, fiber players like Frontier, and our national fastest ISP, Sonic. (How does Sonic not win here if it is the fastest nationally? Because Fision’s other locations along the East Coast lower its national scores; in the Pacific states, it stands alone, speed-wise.)
Best ISPs in Alaska and Hawaii
No single ISP in all of vast Alaska had enough users on our speed test to qualify for inclusion. The closest is GCI, the major ISP and telco there, which is found in Anchorage and many other towns. GCI says its service is available to 80% of Alaskans.
As always, on the islands of Hawaii, while there are a few smaller services (Verizon 5G Home Internet, among others), the two main players have been Spectrum and Hawaiian Telecom for a long time. They’re the only two with over 100 tests each this year. A two-carrier race doesn’t work that well with our methodology, but nevertheless, Spectrum wins thanks to higher speed, lower price, and better coverage.
The Best ISPs for 2025: Full Results
Here are the complete tables for all the charts above, including the ISPs beyond the top 10 in each location. Access each table using the arrows or the dropdown menu at the top; click the top cell for each column to reorder the rows (click again to reorder in the other direction). You can also search for keywords or numbers.
Speeds are based on 333,059 PCMag Speed Test results from US-based ISP users received between June 1, 2024 and June 5, 2025. For more, read our methodology.
Then, click the speed test below to be included in our next full report on The Best ISPs.