What’s going on
Every three months, Newest Ookla Report announces the results it collects from information gleaned from millions of customer uses of its Speedtest. Think of it as a quarterly check on the speeds Americans get from their internet service providers.
why does it matter
Americans are increasingly relying on broadband connections in their homes for work and play, so the actual performance of those Internet services is vital.
Verizon has been knocked off the mountain. The latest Ookla Speedtest intelligence report, released this week, named Cox Communications the fastest fixed broadband provider in the US for the second quarter of 2022. Verizon finished on top in the first three months of 2022.
In fact, Verizon had held the top spot every quarter since the beginning of 2020. However, Ookla’s report, which uses data from customer queries on Speedtest.net, now uses the median instead of the mean. So we’re not exactly comparing apples to apples. The following image from the Ookla site gives an example of the difference.
As an Ookla spokesperson told me via email: “We implemented this change to more accurately represent the typical performance that consumers actually experience on a network.”
Cox also did well regionally. It was the fastest fixed broadband provider in 14 of the 100 most populous cities in the country, including the fastest city in the US, Gilbert, Arizona, as well as Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Diego.
Additionally, it was the fastest ISP in four states: Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Not bad, sure, but Xfinity was best in 12 states, Spectrum in seven, and Google Fiber and Verizon each won five states. That was well below the top three providers of Frontier (113 Mbps), Verizon (112 Mbps), and AT&T (112 Mbps). It also couldn’t keep up with Xfinity (19 Mbps), CenturyLink (12 Mbps), or Spectrum (11.7 Mbps).
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