When it comes to internet speeds, “you get what you pay for” is pretty far from the truth a majority of the time. The Wall Street Journal used Ookla’s speed-testing data to survey some 800 US cities and 27 ISPs in terms of advertised transfer rates and what customers are actually getting, and the results are pretty surprising. A vast majority of providers give their customers the short shrift on speed, while a handful of ISPs actually exceed promised speeds by eight percent or more.
If your Internet speed feels too slow, it probably is. Most major U.S. Internet service providers usually deliver slower speeds than they advertise to their customers. Indeed, the vast majority of the 800 cities included in the sortable table below experience median Internet speeds that are slower than what their providers advertise, according to data provided by Ookla and its online speed test, Speedtest.net. Ookla, which previously licensed its data and technology to the Federal Communications Commission, compiled these data from tens of millions of speed tests as well as surveys of 646,404 Speedtest users’ subscribed Internet speeds over the past 12 months.
