What this site is, and how it pays for itself

Almost every comparison site in the United States shows you the same handful of national brands wherever you live, then sends you to a page that says “enter your address to see if it is available.” That is backwards. Availability is the first question, not the last.

And the national brands are not the whole market. In most of the country the best service on the street comes from a regional operator — Metronet, Ziply, TDS, Sparklight, a rural electric cooperative, a fixed wireless company with four towers and eight hundred customers. Those companies serve real households and are invisible on every national list.

So we built the comparison the other way around: start from where you live, show everyone who serves it, and rank by what the service actually costs and does rather than who has the biggest marketing budget.

Geography. States, cities and the 41,865 ZIP codes come from US Census Bureau and USPS definitions. Population figures are Census Bureau estimates.

Providers and plans. Every provider page carries one of three labels. Checked means we have compared the plans against the provider's own published rates, and the page gives the date and the source. Out of date means we checked, found the entry wrong, and have not finished re-sourcing it — those figures should not be relied on. Not yet checked means exactly that: written from general knowledge and not verified against anything.

We would rather show you which is which than present all of it with the same confidence. Prices change without notice in any case, so confirm with the provider before you sign.

Coverage. This is where we are weakest, and we would rather say so than pretend. Availability in the US is decided address by address and no public dataset is accurate at that resolution. We model it from three things we do know: the provider's state footprint, the size of the market, and its published reach. The model is deterministic — the same city always returns the same result — and it is a model. The roadmap is to replace it with FCC Broadband Data Collection figures at the census block level.

When someone asks us to put them in touch with a provider, we pass that introduction on, and some providers pay a referral fee for it. That is the business.

Two things follow that we hold to: the referral fee does not change the ranking, and it never applies to browsing. You can use every page on this site without giving us anything.

Listing is free for providers. Any ISP can be listed, including ones that will never pay us anything, and they are ranked by the same formula as everyone else.