Cities With The Fastest Download Speeds The fastest city in the US for August 2020 is Harbor City followed by Carver in second place, and Millbrae in 3rd place. Information about how we calculate these results is available below.

The Geography of Fast Internet

As you can see, Internet infrastructure isn’t created equal.

While some top cities on the east and west coasts are more or less what you would expect, look in the heartland, and you’ll see some surprises.

Cities that invest in fiber networks and work to attract the top providers dramatically outperform less-connected cities in terms of citywide access to robust Internet service.

Explore the map below for a bird’s-eye view of cities with top-performing Internet options — whether you’re considering tech-friendly relocation options or simply curious to see how your home city stacks up.

Map of the Fastest Cities in the US

How We Evaluated The Fastest Speeds In Each City

When we started digging into the data to power this page, our initial plan was to create a simple average of all of the speedtests for a city.

However, we quickly found that simple averages lead to misleading results. Differing plan speeds, home network setups, and provider counts led to averages that poorly represented the real-world experience of Internet consumers in those areas — before even considering the disparity in numbers of speed tests available in each community.

Our solution: to display the download speed from the speedtest found in the 90th percentile of all of the tests for a city in a given month.

This approach controls variables while minimizing outlier impact. We can confidently say that 10% of the speedtests we saw were faster than the speed displayed, while 90% of them were slower than it.

We concluded that this is the most objective and accurate way to calculate the fastest cities while still controlling for the many variables that can vary across thousands of providers and millions of speed tests.