Tag Archives: Ookla

Ookla’s WISP Report Card

Ookla published a WISP Report Card in November that looks at the speed performance of eight large WISPs – Etheric Networks, GeoLinks, NextLink, Resound Networks, Rise Broadband, Starry, Unwired Broadband, and Wisper Internet. Since this article was published, Starry has been acquired by Verizon. Ookla trended speed test results for each WISP by quarter from Q1 2021 through Q2 2025.

The results of the speed tests for most WISPs were not spectacular. The best performing WISP was Starry, with 67% of customers achieving a speed that meets the FCC definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps. Rise Broadband performed the worst, with only 6.7% of customers achieving 100/20 Mbps speeds. However, speed isn’t always a fair metric since some of the WISPs sell products with lower speed thresholds. For example, GeoLinks says its most popular product is 30/30 Mbps.

It’s also hard to compare the biggest WISPs because they have different business plans and use different spectrum. For example, Starry uses the 37.1, 37.3, and 37.5 GHz bands of millimeter wave spectrum, mostly serves apartment buildings, and places base stations within a mile of customers. Most of the other WISPs are more traditional rural WISPs using a mix of unlicensed and licensed spectrum. Following is a short summary of each of the eight WISPs.

Etheric Networks.  8.4% of customers achieve 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 41/30 Mbps. The company used traditional unlicensed spectrum. The company markets speeds from up to 100 Mbps to up to 1 Gbps.

GeoLinks.  8.7% of customers achieve 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 23/20 Mbps. The company uses a combination of LMDS, unlicensed 5 GHz, and millimeter wave spectrum. Marketed plans range from 10/10 to 100/25 Mbps.

NextLink.  24.4% of customers achieve speeds of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 68/18 Mbps. The company purchased 1,100 CBRS PALs licenses. The company markets speeds between 50 and 500 Mbps. The company is midway through network upgrades funded by RDOF, so speeds should increase significantly.

Resound Networks. 41.5% of customers achieve speeds of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 99/31 Mbps. The company uses unlicensed 5 GHz and 6 GHz spectrum. The company offers speed packages between 75 Mbps and 1 gigabit.

Rise Broadband. 6.7% of customers achieve speeds of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 43/18 Mbps. The company uses a combination of unlicensed spectrum and CBRS. Speed packages range from 50 to 400 Mbps. The company claims to be the largest WISP with 200,000 customers.

Starry. 66.9% of customers achieve 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 202/54 Mbps. Starry uses millimeter wave spectrum to reach apartment buildings in five major metropolitan markets. The company markets speeds between 200 Mbps and 1 Gbps. Speeds have nearly doubled since 2021.

Unwired Broadband  21.8% of customers achieve a speed of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 50/17 Mbps. The company uses a combination of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Pricing plans start at 100 Mbps.

Wisper Internet. 26.0% of customers achieve a speed of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 53/12 Mbps. The company uses unlicensed 5 GHz and a mix of licensed and unlicensed 2.5 GHz and CBRS spectrum. Speed plans range from 25 to 400 Mbps.

A few things to observe about the group. The article points out that rural WISPs are seeing serious speed competition from Starlink, which will intensify when Starlink starts launching its next generation of satellites in 2026. Some of the WISPs have improved speeds significantly since 2021, although a few have not. Some of the WISPs are doing upgrades to much faster radios and it will be interesting to see a future article showing speed trends in a few years. Like with satellite broadband, the overall weakness of most of the WISPs today is the upload speeds.

Falling FWA Speeds

Ookla recently published a report looking at broadband speeds being delivered with FWA cellular broadband offered by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The report includes the chart shown below that tracks the median download speeds of each carrier, by quarter, since the third quarter of 2023.

There are some interesting stories in the chart:

  • At the end of the third quarter of 2023, the median download speed was nearly the same for all three carriers, between 140 and 150 Mbps.
  • Since then, T-Mobile speeds have increased significantly, peaking at 221.7 Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2025. T-Mobile’s median speeds are now twice the speeds of AT&T.
  • The Ookla blog talks about the fact that speed for all three carriers dropped from the second quarter of this year to the end of the third quarter. AT&T dropped from 114.3 Mbps to 104.6 Mbps. T-Mobile dropped from 221.7 Mbps to 209.1 Mbps. Verizon has the largest drop from 167.3 Mbps to 137.8 Mbps.

Ookla asks the question of why speeds dropped during those two quarters. They expect that some of the drop is due to foliage that slows down cellular signals from late fall until autumn. Foliage is clearly an issue in many parts of the country.

Ookla also asks the question if the networks are experiencing problems due to oversubscription. The three carriers have seen extraordinary growth. At the end of the third quarter of 2023 there were just under 7 million FWA customers. By the end of the third quarter of this year, the companies had just under 14.5 million customers, having added over 7.5 million FWA customers in two years.

It’s clear that FWA customers put a lot of stress on a cellular network. Assuming that FWA customers are the same as other broadband customers, the average U.S. broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes of broadband per month at the end of the third quarter, compared to 17 gigabytes for the average cellphone customer. From a bandwidth perspective, an FWA customer uses 38 times more cell site resources than a cellular customer.

The questions that Ookla is asking are not easily answered because FWA is not a homogeneous broadband product. Customers must be located near a tower to get the fastest speeds, and speeds drop off as the distance between customers and a tower increases. Consider AT&T, which has been using FWA as a replacement for DSL. This likely means AT&T is offering FWA to customers at a greater distance from towers than the other two carriers, in order to provide that copper alternative. That alone could contribute to AT&T’s lower median speeds.

The FWA market isn’t going to remain static. AT&T recently upgraded 23,000 cell sites with the 3.45 MHz spectrum the company acquired from EchoStar. That should cause a big upward spike in AT&T FWA speeds this quarter.

The Ookla report is fascinating. It will be interesting to watch the FWA speeds over time to better understand seasonality, foliage, and the impact of rapid customer growth.

Limiting Large Network Outages

Ookla recently published an interesting article that emphasizes what I have been telling folks for a long time. Not that many years ago, telephone and broadband networks were structured in such a way that most outages were local events. A fiber cut might kill service to a neighborhood; an electronics failure might kill service to a larger area, but for the most part, outages were contained within a discrete and local area.

There were exceptions. Rural areas have been susceptible to fiber cuts in the fiber that provides Internet backbone. Years ago, I worked with Cook County, Minnesota, which would lose voice and broadband every time there was a cut in the single fiber between Minneapolis and northern Minnesota that supported the area. A public-private partnership was created to build the THOR network to solve backhaul failures in a large chunk of southeastern Colorado.

https://www.ookla.com/articles/building-digital-resilience-strategies-2025

As the article points out, this has all changed because network operators have consolidated and interconnected networks across large geographic areas. Ookla says that the new phenomenon of large scale outages is a direct result of digital transformation. As carriers, companies, and governments have grown increasingly reliant on cloud services, managed providers, and interconnected networks, they now have to live with outages where what used to be a local problem can cascade across a region, or even across the country.

The article looks at the recent power outage in Spain and Portugal that quickly grew from a local outage to a power outage across much of the Iberian Peninsula. Ookla points out that in today’s world, there is not that much difference between outages of a power grid, a cellular network, or a fiber network.

The article points out that outages can cascade much faster than anybody expects. The difference between a temporary disruption and a system-wide crisis depends on how quickly the network operators can recognize and analyze the causes of a problem. Ookla says there are five key steps needed to keep disruptions from escalating. Every major network outage is likely due to network operators failing at one of the early steps of this process.

  • Detection: Spot the first signs of trouble across multiple data sources, from outage reports to operator dashboards.
  • Attribution: Identify the root cause of the problem, whether it’s an internal software bug, a fiber cut, or a regional power failure.
  • Communication: Share timely, accurate information with stakeholders and the public to reduce confusion.
  • Remediation: Act quickly to contain damage, restore critical services, and prevent cascading failures.
  • Learning: Capture lessons from each event and feed them back into playbooks, exercises, and long-term resilience planning.

Ookla believes that the local reaction within the first hour can make a huge difference in the extent and length of an outage. There was one power company in Iberia that was able to isolate itself from the cascading shutdown because it was prepared to react quickly. I wonder how many local ISPs are ready to quickly react to problems caused outside their local network. The Ookla article suggests that local operators can do a lot more to protect themselves and their customers against major outages.

Indoor Cellular Coverage

Ookla wrote a recent article that highlights an increasing problem of poor indoor cellular coverage. The article notes that this is a growing problem since the public increasingly relies on cell phone apps.

Indoor cell coverage is growing poorer for several reasons. First, 5G carriers are migrating to higher mid-band frequencies, which don’t penetrate buildings as well as the lower frequencies used in the past. Years ago, cellular networks widely used 700 MHz and 900 MHz frequencies, which had the wonderful property of penetrating almost anything. I remember being amazed a decade ago when I didn’t lose a cell call in an interior elevator of a building. In recent years, I’ve noticed that my cell phone doesn’t work at the back of my neighborhood grocery store – but it did a decade ago. The problem is only going to get worse as cellular carriers migrate more 5G traffic to higher mid-band spectrum bands (3 GHz and higher).

There are also some changes in buildings that make it harder for wireless signals to penetrate. Ookla cites the increasing use of low-E glass, an energy-efficient glass with a microscopic coating that reflects heat and light – and also cellular signals. Ookla says that modern insulation materials, in general, are less friendly to cell signals.

Ookla also lays some of the blame on regulations that completely focus on outdoor cell coverage and has never acknowledged that 80% of cellular traffic originates from indoors (Ookla cites Ericsson for that statistic). The FCC adopted a minimum standard for outdoor cellular speeds of 25/3 Mbps in October 2020 as part of the 5G Fund for Rural America order. Interestingly, at that time, that was a higher speed than the definition of landline broadband that was still stuck at 25/3 Mbps. A few countries like Germany and Ireland require decent indoor cellular speeds for structures like hospitals, busy business districts, and tourist attractions.

There are some solutions to the problem. One would be for regulators to require better cellular speeds to match how people use it. That may sound like an easy fix, but it’s not.

The best way to improve cellular speeds is to use small cell sites that are closer to homes and businesses. A signal from a cell site in a neighborhood will penetrate nearby buildings a lot better than a signal from a tall tower a mile or more away. One of the limiting factors of cellular call strength that doesn’t get mentioned very often is that the power from cell site is restricted and limited. This is done to stop neighboring tall towers from interfering with each other. Stronger signals would penetrate buildings better but would wreak havoc with existing cellular networks.

Some businesses have tackled the problem on their own. Many hotels, hospitals, and business high-rises have invested in a rooftop cellular repeater (which is really a small cell site) that beams a signal down through the building. That strengthens the signal inside a building but nowhere else.

Ookla recommends an interesting solution, which is to embrace a neutral host model of telecommunications. This would have third party companies build, own, and operate cellular infrastructure, which would be leased to multiple service providers on a wholesale basis. Think of this as the open-access version of infrastructure. A neutral host company would build cell sites where they are most needed by the public and lease capacity to all cellular carriers. Unfortunately, that model has not ever been embraced in the U.S. In fact, Crown Castle, which was the predominant company chasing the neutral hosted model, announced in March that it is selling its small cell business and related fiber networks to Zayo and EQT.

Growing Urban/Rural Broadband Gap

Ookla recently published a report that looks at statistics related to the digital divide. Ookla is in a unique position to understand U.S. broadband since the company is the most popular speed test company that gathers huge numbers of speed tests from all over the country.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

  • 32 states saw an increase in the digital divide between urban and rural households in the second half of 2024. Ookla measured this by looking at the median broadband speeds for urban versus rural parts of each state, and in these states, the gulf between urban and rural increased.
  • Overall speeds are up, and 17 states saw an increase in the percentage of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps, with New Mexico, Colorado, and Minnesota having the most improvement.
  • The number of states where at least 60% of users realized speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster increased from 9 in the first half of 2024 to 22 in the second half of the year.
  • The states with the highest percentage of users seeing fast speeds are New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, North Dakota, and Maryland. 19 states and the District of Columbia had at least 60% of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps.
  • Alaska and Montana had the worst broadband performance with less than 40% of users receiving speeds faster than 100/20 Mbps.
  • South Carolina is the only state that saw improvements in broadband performance in both urban and rural parts of the state.

Some states showed dramatic improvements in the percentage of speed tests above 100/20 Mbps. New Mexico climbed from 31.85% in the second half of 2023 to 52.37% in the second half of 2024, an improvement of 20.5%. Other big increases were Colorado at 19.1%, Pennsylvania at 18.5%, Minnesota at 17.4%, and Washington at 17.2%.

Ookla cited reports from the Fiber Broadband Association that shows that 56.5% of homes were passed by fiber at the end of 2024, an increase of 10.3 million new fiber passings during the year. Ookla credits the overall increase in speeds and the percentage of users seeing speeds faster than 100/20 Mbps on these investments.

Ookla came to the overall conclusion that urban broadband is improving at a faster pace than rural broadband. I was surprised by this finding. While it’s true that BEAD grants have continued to move slowly, there was a huge amount of broadband upgrades in rural markets last year. Many billions of dollars were invested in fiber from grant programs like the Capital Project Funds, Reconnect, and RDOF. A lot of rural communities have also started to see the much faster radios from WISPs and cellular carriers. But even with those improvements, speed improvements in urban areas are outpacing improvements in rural America.

Rural 5G

The FCC voted last year to launch the 5G Fund for Rural America to expand 5G coverage into the many parts of country with poor cell coverage. It may turn out that market forces might mean that some of that subsidy won’t be needed since the big carriers are expanding into rural areas. A recent blog from Ookla documents the rural expansion of 5G. Ookla concludes that fierce nationwide competitive pressure is driving the carriers to look harder at rural areas to gain every possible customer.

Ookla, which collects a huge volume of speed tests, is one of the few companies that can look at carrier expansion using its own data. When Ookla sees multiple speed tests on 5G, it has definitive proof that coverage is present in an area. Ookla looked at the recent rural expansion from each of the three primary carriers.

T-Mobile. Ookla shows that T-Mobile has the largest rural 5G footprint today. T-Mobile claims it covers 323 million people, or 98% of U.S. households with 5G using its low-band 600 MHz spectrum. This low-band spectrum carriers for a greater distance than the spectrum used by other carriers. The company was required to expand coverage to 97% of the population as part of the agreement with the FCC when it purchased Sprint. I have to wonder about the 98% coverage. If you look closely at the FCC cellular maps, T-Mobile shows coverage of very slow speeds over a lot of rural America, and you have to wonder if this coverage is real enough to even use for voice calls.

T-Mobile also is the fastest carrier in much of the country, which came from the deployment of the 2.5 GHz spectrum that the company acquired with the Sprint purchase. The company has used the 150 MHz band of the spectrum to increase speeds in the top 100 markets in the country. We know that T-Mobile has rural plans since the company announced in 2024 that it is hoping to achieve a 20% market share in rural America by the end of 2025. That claim is bolstered by the pending close of the purchase of 30% of the spectrum and all 4.5 million customers of UScellular.

AT&T. A lot of the company’s rural expansion comes from FirstNet. This is a nationally funded program to create a nationwide first responder network. AT&T was awarded $6.5 billion to build the network and also given 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum. FirstNet brought AT&T a 25-year contract with the government. There is an expected $2 billion additional investment to upgrade the network to 5G everywhere.

One of the key requirements for FirstNet is that it must be made available to first responders in rural areas. This led AT&T to install FirstNet on all of its own towers and to build over 1,000 rural towers. AT&T announced in October 2024 that it has 6.4 million connections and 29,000 public safety agencies on the network. AT&T has also invested heavily in spectrum auctions and spent $37 billion the FCC’s C-band and 3.45 GHz auctions.

Verizon. Verizon doesn’t own much low-band spectrum that would give it coverage in rural areas. Instead, the company relied on a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) that allows one spectrum band to toggle between 4G LTE and 5G  in 1 millisecond increments. While it works, this didn’t give the company the boost it was hoping for.

Verizon’s rural strategy seems to be through acquisition, and the company has bought cell carriers operating in Kentucky, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Montana. Verizon is also buying $1 billion of 850 MHz, AWS and PCS spectrum from UScellular.

Verizon is betting on the C-Band spectrum that it purchased in 2021 for $52 billion. It’s hoping that the 161 MHz band of spectrum will carry it into the future. The company has announced it intends to deploy more rural spectrum,

None of the carriers are likely to expand into sparely populated rural areas where coverage is often nonexistent. But the current expansion plans likely will bring cellular relief to a lot of rural areas, long before any solution might come from the FCC.

A New Complaint About BEAD Maps

Earlier this month the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) made an ex parte filing with the FCC that warned that the current FCC maps do not reflect the reality on the ground of rural broadband. They warn that there are a lot of places that need broadband that will not be covered by BEAD. They warn that areas that don’t get funding now by BEAD will be left behind.

Anybody who reads this blog knows that I’ve been making this same argument for the last several years. As NRECA points out, the new FCC broadband maps are a big step up from the previous FCC mapping. The old maps reported broadband by Census block, and in doing so often showed an area as having good broadband when only a few places in the block had a faster technology.

NRECA points out that the fatal flaw in the new maps is that ISPs self-report broadband speeds and are free to report marketing speeds instead of something closer to what is actually delivered to customers. It was an interesting policy choice for the FCC to make since this doesn’t match what the FCC is doing elsewhere. For example, the FCC requires ISPs to report broadband speeds for each product on the new broadband labels. The rules for the labels suggest that ISPs should report speeds that have some basis derived from internal ISP speed testing. In my early examination of broadband labels, most ISPs are ignoring this requirement and claim the identical speed on the broadband labels that is reported on the FCC maps.

ISPs know the speeds they are delivering to customers. Most broadband networks have the ability to measure speeds from their core network to the customer location – a speed that doesn’t get influenced by the performance of WiFi inside of a customer premise.

I’ve seen numerous examples of speeds reported for the FCC maps that are far faster than speeds measured by speed tests. For example, I recently found a big telco reporting 100/20 Mbps for rural DSL, while Ookla speed tests show an average speed around 25 Mbps – and no speed test faster than 40 Mbps. I’ve seen the same thing for WISPs and FWA cellular broadband, where Ookla speed tests are far slower than what is being reported to the FCC. There are cable companies with no speed tests of upload speeds faster than 20 Mbps, which means their areas should be eligible for BEAD grant funding.

In its filing, NRECA suggested that the public should be allowed to take speed tests to report to the FCC. The FCC certainly has the ability to crowdsource speed tests since it does so for cellular broadband. Customers can take a cellular speed test using an FCC speed test app. I can’t think of any reason why the FCC couldn’t directly collect speed tests directly from customers using the same or a similar app. I’m also mystified why the FCC couldn’t partner with one of the big speed test sites like Ookla to gather the many millions of speed tests that are already being taken every day.

ISPs do not want customer speed tests to be part of the equation, and they have some valid arguments that the results of any given speed test can’t be trusted. Every ISP will tell you that a big part of the problem that customers have with broadband is the WiFi signal inside their home. They might have old or inadequately configured routers. They might be taking speed tests from a computer located far from the in-home router.

But interestingly, if you gather enough speed tests, a good picture of broadband performance emerges. I’ve always focused on the maximum speeds measured for a given ISP. If an ISP says it can deliver 100 Mbps or gigabit speed, then there should be some speed tests close to that speed. My experience is that looking at large numbers of speed tests will quickly identify ISPs who are reporting speeds far faster than what they are delivering.

To be fair to ISPs, speed tests can also show the opposite. I’ve seen ISPs that claim a speed on the FCC maps of 25 Mbps or 50 Mbps but are delivering much faster speeds.

The NRECA is absolutely right about the BEAD grants. There are a lot of rural areas that will be excluded from BEAD because of overstated broadband speeds. Broadband offices and the NTIA will say that there is a BEAD map challenge process to address this issue. But I could write a whole series of blogs describing the ridiculous steps that NTIA is requires to mount a successful map challenge for BEAD. Even if the map challenge process was reasonable, many local governments don’t have the resources or budget to mount a serious map challenge. This means that counties that were unable to mount a successful BEAD map challenge have a good chance of having locations improperly excluded from BEAD.

When the dust settles from BEAD grants, there are going to be a whole lot of rural neighborhoods that will not get a broadband solution – and they are going to be vocal about it.  My prediction is that this is going to end up being a few million such rural locations. As much as the industry wants to pretend that BEAD is going to solve the rural broadband issue, anybody who looks close at the FCC maps and the BEAD process knows this is not the case.

Comparing State Broadband Performance

Ookla recently published a report that compares broadband connectivity and performance in each state. The report highlights the percentage of broadband customers who are receiving broadband speeds that meet the FCC’s definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps.  This is also the speed threshold being used for the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program, which is supposed to provide grants to every part of the country that can’t achieve 100/20 Mbps. Ookla is the largest and most commonly used speed test in the country and receives millions of tests each day, so these comparisons are based on huge numbers of speed tests.

The Ookla results are interesting and give states a way to compare themselves to peer states. Connecticut, North Dakota, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Tennessee had the highest percentage of speed tests that met the 100/20 Mbps threshold. downstream and 20 Mbps upstream. Each state had over 62% of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps – with Connecticut at 65.8% and Tennessee at 62.2%.

Ookla also got more granular in its analysis. For example, the analysis compared average speed tests result in each state for urban and rural broadband customers. There is a map in the report that industry folks are going to want to explore. This comparison produced some interesting results:

  • Connecticut, which has the overall highest percentage of homes receiving 100/20 Mbps had 72.4% of urban households and 62.3% of rural households receiving that speed. Number two overall fastest was North Dakota which had 69.7% urban and 64.6% rural.
  • The state with the biggest urban/rural digital divide was Washington, with 61.1% of urban households and only 28.7% or rural households receiving 100/20 Mbps.
  • South Carolina has a higher percentage of rural homes receiving fast speeds (56.4%) than urban homes (55.1%). The other states where urban and rural broadband performance is similar are North Dakota and Nevada.
  • Some of the most populous states had low rural broadband speeds including Illinois (38.7%), New York (39.4%), and California (40.1%).
  • The states with the lowest percentage of rural homes meeting 100/20 Mbps are also the least densely populated – Alaska (17.3%), Montana (20.8%), and Wyoming (25.3%).
  • The other states with percentage of rural broadband coverage under 40% include New Mexico (29.4%), Wisconsin (31.4%), Oregon (32.2%), Idaho (34.1%), Michigan (37.5%), and Maine (37.6%). These are the states that will require a heavy life from BEAD grants.
  • Some states are probably surprising to those outside of the industry. The best example is Mississippi, which historically had poor broadband coverage. However, the analysis shows urban coverage at 62.3% and rural at 56.6%. There is a lot of industry derision aimed at the RDOF program, but that program enabled rural electric coops in the state to build fiber.
  • Finally, a few states showed big improvement between the first two quarters and 2023 and the first two quarters in 2024. The states with the biggest improvements are New Mexico (50%), Arizona, (45%), Minnesota (38%), and Nevada (37%).

Anybody who looks closely at speed test results will quickly understand that any given speed test might not be accurate because of issues inside a home. A home might receive adequate broadband, but an old or underperforming WiFi router might lower the speed delivered to devices. WiFi is also subject to distance and interference issues, and computers located at the far end of a house might receive significantly slower speeds.

However, when taken in mass, speed tests provide an accurate comparison – if you assume that WiFi is a problem everywhere. This means is that every state actually has a higher percentage of homes that receive 100/20 Mbps than shown by the Ookla numbers. However, the relative differences between states, or between urban and rural parts of states are believable.

Is 5G Faster than 4G?

Ookla recently tackled this question in one of its research articles. Ookla compared the time it takes to load pages for Facebook, Google, and YouTube on cellphones using 4G LTE networks versus 5G networks.

Ookla thinks that page load speed is a great way to measure cellphone experience. The time needed to load a web page is directly impacted by latency, which measures the lag between the time a phone requests a website and that website responds. You might think that when your phone asks to see a website that the Internet just facilitates the connection. In reality, the web process is not perfect, and not every bit from a web site make it to your phone on the first try. In a normal web connection, the receiving ISP might need to make five to seven requests to resend missing bits until a connection is made between a web site and your phone. Latency measures the sum of the needed transactions.

Page load time is a critical statistic for eCommerce sites like Amazon. Ookla cites an article from Medium that quantifies the impact of slow page loads. According to the article:

  • 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less.
  • 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
  • Surveys have shown that a delay of 1 second reduces customer satisfaction for using a website by 16%.
  • 79% of shoppers who are not satisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from the same site again.
  • This has a huge impact on eCommerce. According to the article, every 1 second delay in page load time costs Amazon $2.1 billion in sales per year.

Ookla also cited an older Ookla article which is a great primer on why latency matters.

So how did 5G compare to 4G LTE in the U.S.? According to Ookla, 5G improved page load times by 21% to 26% for the three popular web sites.

This will surprise some folks. I know several people who swear that 4G LTE is faster than 5G – and they might be right in their immediate neighborhood. Also note that measuring page load time is not the same as measuring speed on a speed test.

We should step back and look at the difference between 4G LTE and 5G. To a large degree, these are the same technology, and the difference is the frequency being used by the cellphone. The big carriers all established new bands of frequency they labeled as 5G, but initially operated these new bands with the identical specifications operating the 4G LTE networks. Over time, the carriers have introduced a few 5G improvements in the 5G portion of the network – but the long list of whiz-bang improvements that were promised by 5G have never materialized. Your 5G phone is still not using network slicing and other improvements that promised a big technology leap for 5G.

Also note that Ookla is reporting national statistics, and it’s likely that these statistics vary by market. It’s also likely that the performance of the two technologies differs during the day as the load on the two networks ebbs and flows. But the Ookla statistics show that, overall, there is better performance on 5G. Perhaps the article should have come with the traditional advertising warning: “Note that your performance might vary.”

An Update on Satellite Broadband

Ookla recently published a blog that looks at the speed performance of satellite broadband, focusing mostly on Starlink. I haven’t looked at this broadband sector for a while and thought it was time for an update.

Starlink has had a busy year. At the end of November, the company had 5,500 satellites in orbit, up from over 3,200 at the end of 2022. The first constellation is still slated to reach almost 12,000 satellites, and the company has tentative permission from the FCC to extend to 42,000. We’re about to start seeing the balancing act of launching new satellites while replacing older ones, as some of the original satellites are being decommissioned and are falling from orbit. The company has upgraded its satellites, and the newest ones weigh three times more than the original fleet.

Customers are obviously liking the bandwidth, and Starlink passed 2 million worldwide customers in September 2023. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the company has started to make a small monthly profit, an important step in long-term viability. The FCC recently, in response to a challenge by the company, reiterated that it will not be giving Starlink any of the $900 million the company won in the RDOF reverse auction at the end of 2020.

Ookla provides interesting statistics.

  • Starlink’s median download speed in the third quarter of 2023 in North America was 64.5 Mbps. That is a significant improvement over 2022 where the median speed was 53 Mbps. This is still significantly lower than what the company had promised in its original RDOF filing where the company said it could easily provide speeds to everybody of at least 100 Mbps.
  • Ookla noted that the speeds reported on speed tests had a relatively narrow variance, which distinguishes the technology from DSL and fixed wireless, which are both dependent on the distance between a customer and the network transmitter.
  • Ookla noted that 60% of Starlink speed tests were coming from urban areas. They can’t know the relative penetration rates of urban versus rural due to Starlink selling so many roaming units that can be installed on the roof of a camper or moved from place to place.

High-orbit geosynchronous satellites are not performing as well as Starlink. The median speed test in the third quarter for HughesNet was 15.87 Mbps, and Viasat was 34.72 Mbps. The real differentiator between these companies and Starlink is the latency, with the high-orbit satellites having a median latency well above 500 milliseconds, while Starlink performance is similar to cable companies.

The biggest problem that I hear from Starlink users is the price, with a base price of $110 per month, but many people are paying $120 since they live in regions that have a lot of Starlink subscribers. I also know several folks who tried the technology and abandoned it – all lived in heavy woods and were never able to find a configuration that would deliver reliable broadband. I’ve also been seeing reports during the year on surveys where customers say the broadband suffers during rainy weather.

An interesting new player will soon enter the market – Project Kuiper, backed by Jeff Bezos. After multiple delays, the company finally launched its first two test satellites in 2023. The company is still optimistic about selling broadband in two or three years and has reserved numerous launch windows with rocket companies. The company has been moot on broadband pricing, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company come up with interesting bundling packages that include Amazon.

The biggest threat to U.S. satellite broadband is still a few year away. Much of the rural areas that the satellite ISPs do well in will see new broadband networks constructed with BEAD and other broadband grants. It’s going to be hard to keep customers priced at $110 per month when faster alternatives will be available for less. Of course, the rural U.S. is only a tiny portion of the worldwide market for Starlink and other satellite providers, and in the long run it probably doesn’t matter how they do here. We live in a world where several billion people still don’t have any access to broadband – so the growth potential is gigantic.