A Surprising Winner Is Named as the US's Fastest Internet Provider, According to the Most Recent Ookla Report

 

Verizon has been driven from the peak. This week's release of the most recent Ookla Speedtest Intelligence study ranked Cox Communications as the nation's fastest fixed broadband provider for the second quarter of 2022. In the first three months of 2022, Verizon had won.

In actuality, Verizon had won the top rank each quarter since the year 2020 began. Ookla's report, which makes use of information from customer-run searches on Speedtest.net, now employs the median rather than the mean. So, our comparisons aren't really apples to apples. The difference is illustrated in the figure below from the Ookla website.

"We adopted this modification to more properly portray the normal performance that consumers actually experience on a network," an Ookla official said to me in an email.

With a median download speed of almost 197 megabits per second during the second quarter of 2022, Cox came out on top clearly. The second-place finisher, Xfinity, achieved a median download speed of 184Mbps. At 183Mbps, Spectrum placed third, followed by Verizon (171Mbps), and AT&T (about 147Mbps) to round out the top five.

Cox did well locally as well. In 14 of the 100 largest cities in the US, including Gilbert, Arizona, the fastest city in the US, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and San Diego, it was the fastest fixed broadband provider.

Additionally, it was the fastest ISP in Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada, and Oklahoma, among other four states. It was certainly not horrible, but Xfinity led the pack in 12 states, Spectrum in 7, and Google Fiber and Verizon each took five.

Cox entirely missed the top five for the fastest upload speeds despite its dominant performance at the top of the speed table. The median upload speed was just under 11 Mbps. That was significantly slower than the top three carriers, AT&T (113Mbps), Verizon (112Mbps), and Frontier (113Mbps) (112Mbps). Additionally, it fell short of Xfinity (19Mbps), CenturyLink (12Mbps), or Spectrum (11.7Mbps).

That's not entirely out of the ordinary. The faster upload speeds you can find with a fiber-optic internet connection—which AT&T, Frontier, and Verizon all boast to some percentage within their respective service areas—cannot be matched by the cable connections offered by Cox, Spectrum, and Xfinity (or the DSL network of CenturyLink, for that matter).