Municipal providers are competitive with their broadband competitors in median upload speed but struggle in downloads, according to a report by Ookla.
The organization applied its Speedtest monitoring to 14 municipal providers from December 2024 to the end of last year. One network — EBP in Chattanooga, Tennessee — did not have enough local competition to generate comparisons.
The report found that eight of the municipal networks it studied beat their local provider competitors in median upload speed. Sherwood Broadband — in the town of the same name in Oregon — was the only one to beat its local competitor in median download speed.
Other key findings from the Ookla report:
- Connexion, a municipal provider in Fort Collins, Colorado, led in median upload speed with an average of more than 300 Mbps for the entire 13-month period.
- Sherwood Broadband was the top provider in median download speeds. It delivered an average median download speed of more than 400 Mbps eight months out of the 13-month period.
- UTOPIA Fiber in Utah delivered the lowest latency of all the broadband providers, the report said. It had a multi-server latency consistently in the low 6 ms to 8 ms range.
The municipal providers assessed for the report were UTOPIA Fiber (Utah), Sherwood Broadband (Sherwood, Oregon), Connexion (Fort Collins, Colorado), NextLight (Longmont, Colorado), Pulse Fiber (Loveland, Colorado), LFT Fiber (Lafayette, Louisiana), Cedar Falls Utilities (Cedar Falls, Iowa), BrightRidge (Johnson City, Tennessee), CDE Lightband (Clarksville, Tennessee), Electric Power Board (EPB) Fiber (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Northcentral Connect (Olive Branch, Mississippi), OptiLink (Dalton, Georgia), FairLawnGig (Fairlawn, Ohio), and Greenlight Community Broadband (Wilson, North Carolina).
“Our review of 13-months of data in markets with municipal broadband providers shows that not only are these providers offering a valuable service to their residents, they also are often outperforming the national ISPs in upload speeds and latency,” said Ookla editorial director and report author Sue Marek.
“While traditional cable providers are making strides with network upgrades like mid-split technology to improve upload performance, they still largely trail the symmetrical speeds and low-latency profiles inherent to the ‘greenfield’ fiber networks built by municipalities.”
Earlier this month, Accenture announced that it is in the process of acquiring Ookla.
In September, 2024, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) released an interactive community networks map that illustrated the growth of municipal networks.
