- Comcast won in three of five national fixed broadband experience categories
- Fiber players, particularly AT&T, won more metro awards
- FWA also managed to bag some joint wins on the metro level
Cable operator Comcast came out on top in Opensignal's May 2026 Fixed Broadband Experience report, winning three of five national award categories. But fiber providers dominated metro-level rankings.
Opensignal measured reliability, consistent quality, download speed, upload speed and video experience at both the national and 50 metro areas.
On the national level, Comcast won for consistent quality, download speed and video, beating out AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Charter’s Spectrum service. Charter won in the reliability category while AT&T topped the list for upload speeds.
“All operators show improvement across the majority of metrics compared to last year’s report,” Opensignal Principal Analyst Fiona Armstrong-Mills wrote. “Both cable providers (Xfinity and Spectrum) show significant increases in upload speed of 20% and 36% respectively as they deploy later versions of DOCSIS, meanwhile AT&T sees higher performance across all metrics from its widening fiber footprint.”
Looking at the metro-level analysis, though, fiber providers ruled the roost.
Like the national analysis, the metro-level scores were across five categories in 50 metro areas. AT&T’s fiber service won 107 wins (both outright and jointly) across 26 cities, and it won outright across all five categories in 16 cities. Verizon’s fiber also dominated in all five categories in the nine cities where it was included in the rankings. Frontier, which is now part of Verizon, won 19 awards across five metro areas.
But that didn’t mean cable operators were left empty handed.
“Cable operators remain competitive at the MSA level, with both Xfinity and Spectrum recording multiple joint or outright wins across the 50 markets,” Armstrong-Mills wrote. “Xfinity achieves 29 awards spanning 10 of the 28 MSAs where we have reported results…Spectrum’s results are more concentrated, with awards in six MSAs out of the 22 where it is included.”
Fixed wireless also managed to stay in the game, with Verizon and T-Mobile’s FWA services bagging a handful of joint wins in spread across five cities.