How to Measure the Best and Worst States for Broadband?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21, 2026 – Two widely-cited state broadband rankings of 2026, by Ookla and the BroadbandNow, agree that the Northeast leads the nation and Alaska trails it.

But beyond the top few states, they tell very different stories.

Authors of the two reports – Tyler Cooper, editor-in-chief at BroadbandNow, and Sue Marek, editorial director at Ookla – will join with me on ”Best and Worst States for Broadband in 2026,” on Broadband Breakfast Live Online at 12 Noon ET today to discuss their findings.

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Also part of the discussion will be Paroma Sanyal, a principal at the Brattle Group, which has done a number of analytical reports about broadband and Internet access of its own.

Of the Ookla and BroadbandNow reports, Tennessee ranks 10th in Ookla's measure of real-world speeds but 33rd in BroadbandNow's broader scorecard. North Dakota is third on one list and 26th on the other. Utah is seventh and 24th.

We’ll learn more about this from the authors, but my early read of the difference comes down to what each report measures.

Ookla is asking how fast the Internet is for people already online. It’s also counting the share of Speedtest users in each state that can access 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) download by 20 Mbps upload.

BroadbandNow is asking who can get service and afford service, creating a score combining speed, latency and the availability of a lower-price plan.

Price is a core dividing line

Affordability, not infrastructure, is now the biggest gap in American broadband, according to the BroadbandNow report released Aug. 5. The study scores all 50 states and Washington, D.C., on six factors: Broadband availability, availability of low-priced plans, fiber coverage, download speed, upload speed and latency, the delay before data begins to arrive.

New Jersey ranked first for the second straight year, followed by Maryland, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Alaska finished last. Just 0.1% of Alaska households can buy a plan the report classifies as low-priced.

The average state's median download speed, the midpoint of all speed tests, climbed 25 percent in a year to 133.7 Mbps.

But more fiber did not guarantee a higher rank. Kansas and Hawaii each have fiber available to 74.6% of households, yet both sit in the bottom five. Illinois ranked eighth with fiber available to 39.6 percent.

South Carolina fell 20 spots, and its median upload speed of 18.6 Mbps falls short of the 20 Mbps upload the FCC requires for service to count as broadband.

BroadbandNow also ranked 150 cities. None of the nation's 10 largest made the top 25. Pembroke Pines, Fla., ranked first, and eight Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs made the top 25. Toledo, Ohio, is wired to 99.6 percent of households, but only 36 percent can get a low-priced plan.

Speed one measuring stick

For the Ookla report, released Sept. 15, the company that owns Speedtest county the share of users in each state who reached the 100 * 20 Mbps speed threshold, the FCC's minimum standard for broadband, during the first half of 2026.

Forty-six states and D.C. now deliver that standard to at least 60% of users, up from 10 states two years earlier. Connecticut led at 74.7%, followed by New Jersey at 73.5%.

Growth is slowing at the top. Connecticut gained 1.3 percentage points in six months, and New Jersey gained 0.7. Four states remain below 60%: Wisconsin, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska. Maine improved the most, rising from 57.6% to 63%.

Rural users gained ground, according to the Ookla report. The gap between urban and rural users narrowed in every state except California, Delaware and Illinois. The share of Starlink users reaching 100 * 20 Mbps more than doubled in a year, to 40%. Broadband Breakfast’s Kate Keith reported this last month in our coverage of the Ookla report.

Same states, different answers

Side by side, the reports show how much a ranking depends on the question asked.

North Dakota posts the fastest median upload speed in the country, 78.4 Mbps, thanks largely to rural fiber cooperatives. But BroadbandNow found a 30.7-point gap between households that can get broadband there and those that can get a low-priced plan. That gap pulls the state down its list.

Illinois runs the other way. It ranks in BroadbandNow's top 10 on the strength of fast, low-latency service in its cities. On Ookla's data, it has one of the widest urban-rural gaps in the country, at 23.1 points, and that gap grew over the past six months.

The reports do agree on the hardest cases: Alaska, Montana and Wyoming land near the bottom of both.

On the panel

Also joining Wednesday's discussion will be the Brattle Group’s Sanyal. Brattle has done a number of in-depth studies of broadband impact, including one finding that axing the E-Rate program entirely would reduce the country’s real gross domestic product by $4.2 billion. (A study for the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition released earlier this month.)

Another, for the Fiber Broadband Association, attempted to quantify the benefits of deploying fiber to America's 56 million unserved households, finding a net present value of $3.24 trillion over thirty years.

Got questions about the Ookla or BroadbandNow reports? Want to ask a question of Tyler Cooper, Sue Marek or Paroma Sanyal?