West Virginia Has Worst Internet, Claims DesignRush

June 25, 2024 – Agency directory DesignRush released a report on Tuesday claiming that West Virginia has the worst internet in the country, with Georgia and Washington following close behind.

The analysis was conducted on the Federal Communications Commission broadband coverage data to find which states complained about internet services the most. Complaints were collected, separated by type of complaint, and divided by the total number of broadband serviceable locations in each state. States were then ranked by total internet complaints per 100,000 BSLs.

Data found that West Virginia’s internet “causes the most complaints compared to its number of broadband-connected homes and businesses.” The FCC received over 580 internet complaints for every 100,000 broadband serviceable locations in the state, more than twice the national average of 281. 

Since 2014, the most common complaint in West Virginia is availability of high-speed internet, with over 2,300 complaints, representing 39 percent of all of the state’s complaints. 

Georgia was found to have an average of 387 internet complaints over 100,000 BSLs, with the majority portion related to billing. Washington had an average of 285 complaints per 100,000 BSLs.

The top 10 states with the worst internet also included Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Florida, California and Nevada. It found by the same analysis that North Dakota had the best internet satisfaction in the country. 

“The internet is a necessity for many people’s lives and jobs,” said Gianluca Ferruggia, general manager at DesignRush. “With how frustrating it can be being without internet, or even with a poor-quality connection, we wanted to see which states had had the most complaints due to the quality of their internet connections.”

The report found that billing complaints were the most common complaint for 29 states and America overall, with availability the second most common complaint. Rhode Island was the only state with privacy complaints as the most common.

A BroadbandNow report published in April found that Hawaii, Missouri, Montana, Mississippi, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Kansas, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Alaska had the worst internet in the country. Alaska was ranked poorest, with West Virginia on its heels at second poorest internet quality in the country.

BroadbandNow conducted its analysis using a “combination of public and proprietary data” to understand the quality of the internet in all 50 states. This data included internet speed tests as well as the FCC national broadband fabric.

Each state was then ranked according to its access to wired or fixed wireless broadband services, access to wired low-priced broadband, median download speed, median upload speed and median round trip time. 

It found that availability of low-priced broadband has increased across the U.S., but that latency, the measure of the time between request and response, represents a huge geographic disparity between states that do well, and states that do poorly. 

The top states with the best quality internet service were Delaware, New Hampshire, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Virginia, and Washington. Interestingly, Washington was among the 10 ten states with the highest number of complaints, as found by DesignRush.

In contrast, a report by U..S News found that by considering the percentage of households with broadband internet subscription and the share of each state’s housing with access to gigabit internet, New Hampshire ranked highest, followed by Utah, Connecticut, and North Dakota.