Top U.S. Metros for Internet Connectivity & Speed

Most U.S. households are now online as roughly 90% have a broadband subscription, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, with rates climbing above 95% in most major metros. What varies, and varies widely, is how good those connections actually are. Speed, upload capacity, fiber availability, and affordability differ sharply from one city to the next. With hybrid work now a standard arrangement, streaming replacing cable, and households running multiple devices at once, the demands on home connections have only grown.

Using the latest data from Ookla and BroadbandNow Research, here’s a look at where U.S. home internet quality stands, the metros and states leading the country, and where the biggest gaps remain.

Key Takeaways

• Roughly 90% of U.S. households have a broadband subscription, with most major metros above 95%. The differences between markets come down to quality: speed, upload capacity, fiber availability, and affordability.
• Kansas City has the fastest median fixed broadband of any major U.S. metro at 410 Mbps, ahead of San Francisco, San Jose, and New York.
• New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware lead BroadbandNow’s 2025 state rankings. Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming sit at the bottom.
• In several rural states, broadband is available but unaffordable. In Alaska, 74% of residents have access but only 0.2% can get it at affordable pricing.

Speed Is the New Differentiator

For most of the past decade, broadband rankings were built around the share of households with a subscription. That metric has lost most of its discriminating power. Today, almost every major U.S. metro sits in the same narrow band for subscription rates. Speed and quality are where the real variation lives now. Ookla’s Speedtest data put the U.S. median fixed broadband download speed at roughly 300 Mbps in late 2025. The fastest major U.S. cities deliver medians close to 400 Mbps. The slowest states still operate below 100 Mbps. Upload speeds, which matter increasingly for video calls, cloud collaboration, and large file transfers, vary even more sharply. A household with a 50 Mbps upload runs Zoom calls comfortably; a household with 5 Mbps upload doesn’t.

The 10 Fastest U.S. Metros for Home Internet

The cities running the fastest home internet in the U.S. aren’t the ones a casual observer might name first. The leaders earned their position through years of fiber investment, often kicked off by Google Fiber’s early deployments and the competitive responses that followed.

Kansas City leads the country at 410 Mbps. The metro became Google Fiber’s first market in 2012, and the long competitive aftermath, with AT&T, Spectrum, and others building out fiber to keep up, has made multi-gigabit plans widely available.

Texas placed three metros in the top 10, including the runner up and third place. San Antonio (393 Mbps), Austin (381 Mbps), and Dallas (216 Mbps) all benefit from competitive fiber markets where multiple ISPs target the same households. Austin in particular has Google Fiber, AT&T Fiber, and Grande competing head-to-head. Dallas, in tenth place, sits a bit lower in the speed ranking but still clears 200 Mbps, a figure that would have led the country only a few years ago.

Raleigh’s 370 Mbps median placed it fourth, the result of early fiber investment in the Research Triangle. The area’s mix of universities, biotech employers, and tech firms gave ISPs an early reason to extend their networks beyond office parks and into residential areas. St. Petersburg, FL took fifth at 353 Mbps, where similar competitive fiber buildouts have pushed speeds up.

The traditional coastal tech hubs all rank in the top 10 nationally. San Diego was sixth at 327 Mbps. New York finished seventh at 300 Mbps, though given its size there is variation between boroughs. San Jose and San Francisco took eighth and ninth at 267 and 266 Mbps, respectively. Both deliver speeds that comfortably support modern household demands, but they trail the leaders because fiber has been competing with established cable and copper infrastructure across older residential neighborhoods.

State-Level Quality: The Northeast Leads, Mountain West Trails

At the state level, BroadbandNow’s data shows the Northeast continuing to dominate, helped by population density, higher median incomes, and mature fiber networks. New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, and New Hampshire make up the top five, all scoring above 90 out of 100 on a composite measure that weighs access, affordability, speed, latency, and fiber availability.

The Mountain West and parts of the South face the toughest broadband conditions in the country. Montana scored 46.2 out of 100. Wyoming and Idaho aren’t far ahead. Alaska was in a category of its own at 26.5. The issue in many of these states isn’t always missing infrastructure. It’s affordability. The data found that 74% of Alaskans have broadband available where they live, but only 0.2% can access it at what the report classifies as affordable pricing. Similar gaps of more than 20 percentage points show up in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming.

Texas stands out on both rankings. The Lone star state placed 7th nationally on broadband quality and lands three of its metros in the top 10 for speed, a combination few other states can match.

A Connected Country, Unevenly

Most American households are online. The differences that matter now are about what they are online with: how fast their connections are, how reliably their uploads keep up with their downloads, and how much of their household budget broadband consumes. Those differences vary by metro, by state, and by neighborhood. The cities and states that invested early in fiber, and kept it affordable, are the ones giving households the best home internet experience in 2026.

Methodology: Metro-level median download speeds are sourced from Ookla Speedtest performance data for late 2025 through early 2026, covering fixed broadband connections. State rankings are drawn from BroadbandNow Research’s 2025 Best & Worst States for Broadband report, which weights access, affordability, download and upload speeds, latency, and fiber availability, based on analysis of more than 186 million M-Labs speed tests conducted in the first half of 2025. National household subscription figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year estimates. All figures represent the most recent available data at time of publication.