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Buying Guide: The Fastest ISPs in America—and Where You Live
Contents
- The Fastest ISPs in America—and Where You Live
- The Northeast
- The Midwest
- The South
- The West
When comparing the nation's ISPs, there are few metrics of particular importance for the average consumer. How to determine which one is fastest, or which has the most satisfied customers? Sure, price plays a big role, but beyond that, what does one look for beyond sheer advertising dollars to ascertain which ISP is the best?
Look no further than this analysis of results from PCMag's SurfSpeed app, a utility that grabs pages (and page elements) from several popular Web sites to measure your actual Internet surfing speed—not the bandwidth allocation your ISP quotes you. In the past few weeks, we've pored over data points collected from more than 17,000 profiles (that is, unique IP addresses)—comprising over 200,000 individual tests—to find out which are the fastest ISPs in America. Using this data, we've also taken a long, hard look at each state in the country, because fast overall service doesn't translate into fast local service. One provider may have tremendous averages nationwide yet give short shrift to your corner of the country. In this story, we first discuss the United States as a whole; then we walk through a state-by-state analysis to see just how each of the Union's fifty square up.
In addition, SurfSpeed polls users on satisfaction with their ISPs, and we analyze the answers side by side with the speed data. It's interesting to consider satisfaction alongside speed, but note that in only three states were more than 50 percent of users satisfied. The relative positions of ISPs coincide for the most part with the information from our annual Reader Satisfaction Survey, especially among cable service providers. But the satisfaction numbers from SurfSpeed point to a global truth: Faster is always better.