The Fastest ISPs of 2014

The Megabit per second, or Mbps, is the most important measure available today for the actual download and upload throughput of an Internet connection. That's the actual "speed" of a connection; the advertised speed is the available bandwidth (or capacity) of the pipe between you and the servers that make up the Internet as we know it. The two items, real-world throughput versus advertised bandwidth, seldom match up. The speed you get is typically less than your Internet service provider promises, sometimes far less depending on the amount of overhead on a connection.

Testing the connection is the only way to know what you're getting, and that's where Speedtest.net comes in. Provided publicly by Ookla, it's an industry standard used by ISPs around the world that allows customers to check performance. For the fourth year in a row, PCMag and Ookla have teamed up via pcmag.speedtest.net, from which we pull the results from the last 11 months to determine which ISPs used by PCMag readers are the fastest.

On the pages that follow, get ready to compare advertised speeds with what you actually get and see if they come close. We'll also break down the fastest ISPs for businesses and the residential ISPs to favor from region to region, state to state, even from one major metro area to the next.

We don't go by throughput alone, though you can see which ISPs have the best (or worst) upload and download speeds in Mbps. We instead use a formula that takes 80 percent of the all-important download speed and adds it to 20 percent of that still very important upload speed, creating an index number—the PCMag Speed Index. We use the index score to compare and contrast all the ISPs and locations; the highest index is what we consider the fastest.

Naturally, we can't include every single ISP in the United States in this story—there are thousands of them, with the majority being small regional or local ISPs that may indeed have some absolutely outstanding speeds. But we require at least 50 tests from unique IP addresses for any vendor to receive inclusion. That's why, despite a couple of years of operation, we still don't have information on Google Fiber (to name one such vendor). It simply doesn't have enough users who took our test in the past year. The same goes for your own local ISP. So keep that in mind when you hit the comments thread.

If you to know about communities that have the fastest speeds possible in the U.S., check out our list of 24 cities with gigabit Internet in the slideshow above.

The majority of the results here reflect the big-name cable, DSL, and in some cases fiber optic providers of Internet services. Let us know what you think of them. With that, let's dive into the results. They may surprise you.