I attended a CompuServe internal technical conference in the mid-90s and heard about the last mile for the first time. Some of our research people from Arizona were talking about as everything moved to the Internet protocols and fiber optic connections at the core, the only difference between a phone company and a cable company would be how they connected the last mile to their subscribers' homes and businesses. Those experts were right: everything is done with Internet protocols now and the only difference between companies that provide Internet access and content to their customers is the last mile connection. I often see people asking what Internet provider is available, and the lucky people with multiple options ask which is best. Unfortunately, the Internet providers are are businesses who are experts in marketing and they don't make clear the limits of the last mile technology they use.
Advice from friends and neighbors on social media usually is qualitative and not specific. Qualitative advice on customer service is useful, but you really need to know some specifications for the connection to help make your choice. The providers usually tout their best numbers and hide less ideal details. Fortunately, the FCC "broadband nutrition labels" help some, but each last mile connection has its own inherent limitations.
A summary of the last mile options:
| Type of provider | Download | Upload | Special considerations | My opinion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dial up | 53.3 Kbps | 33.6 Kbps | Fading away with landlines. | Last resort Internet connection. Barely usable. |
| DSL | 6 Mbps | 768 Kbps | Fading away with landlines. | Not much better than dial up, hope your provider is upgrading to fiber. |
| Cable | 500 Mbps | 20 Mbps | Commonly available, but providers are planning upgrades to "high split". | Basic broadband. Good choice, but some providers have data caps and are hard to work with. |
| Cable "high split" | 1 Gbps | 1 Gbps | Cable's answer to modern high speed requirements. | Likely to be similar to fiber, not too available yet. |
| Fiber to the home | 100 Mbps to 7 Gbps | 100 Mbps to 7 Gbps | Limited availability, but expanding. | Best possible. |
| Fixed point cellular | 100+ Mbps | 10+ Mbps | Carrier grade NAT, hard for servers. | Good alternative to other providers when they offer poor service. |
| Geosynchronous satellite | 50 Mbps | 5 Mbps | High latency, VOIP, conferencing and gaming are not possible. | Last resort for rural areas. |
| Low orbit satellite constellation | 25-100 Mbps | 5-20 Mbps | Speed depends on where you are and other users, latency is much better. Gaming and VOIP are possible, best not to run a server. | Better than dial up and DSL. Expensive, but a good choice for rural areas. |
When I started writing about this in mid-2024, dial up Internet connections are still possible. They will continue to fade away as the phone companies end support for copper landline phone service, but that is being shutdown in 2026. If the phone line is good and you are calling a digital modem, you can use a 56k V.92 modem for 53.3 Kbps down and 33.6 Kbps down. This is the last choice for an Internet connection and mainly useful as a historical reference.
Dial up usually requires two companies: a phone company for the landline and an Internet Service Provider with a modem to call and connection to the Internet. There are a lot of small, local ISPs that offered good service. Some were also the local phone company, often a co-op. "Kbps" is kilobits per second, a kilobit is 1024 bits. Normally, we think of a byte as 8 bits, but if you want to convert speed in Kbps to KBps, kilobytes per second, divide by 10 or just move the decimal point to account for overhead. So the best possible dial up modem could download at about 5 KBps.
Digital Subscriber Line Internet connections also work over copper landlines so they are slowly fading away, too. DSL uses analog filters to divide the frequencies on the land line into low frequencies for a voice call and high frequencies for data. DSL providers were often the local phone company, but the market was supposed to be competitive and the FCC had rules to foster competition. DSL was even more asymmetric than 56k modems: the first connection I used offered 6 Mbps down but only 768 Kbps upload speed. "Mbps" is megabits per second, 1024x1024 bits per second, or 1024 Kbps. The same divide by 10 to account over overhead rule applies, so that was 0.6 MBps down and 0.07 MBps up.
Cable TV providers became Internet providers by allocating frequencies on the cable to Internet traffic instead of TV channels. They started slow and were asymmetric, my first connection in 1999 or 2000 was 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. They have kept increasing their speeds but recently they have had to increase their download speed and market their service as if higher and higher download speeds were all you needed. They have increased upload speeds somewhat, but remain mostly asymmetric. My current speed is 300 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up.
Cable providers have been losing TV subscribers as customers "cut the cord", but "cord cutters" still use the cable wire into their homes for Internet. The cable providers are changing how they allocate frequencies on the wire to let them offer higher Internet speeds -- including shifting the split between frequencies for upload and download. Spectrum calls this "high split". Neighborhoods upgraded for "high split" get higher speeds and symmetric speeds. I have seen reports of 1 Gbps up and down. Broadband has to evolve to provide higher uploads for many applications and the cable providers are trying to stay in the game. Some providers are also connecting optical fiber to subscriber homes.
Some phone providers, cable providers, and new providers like Google Fiber are connecting the last mile with high speed optical fiber. These installations are called fiber to the home, or FTTH. These providers usually offer the highest speeds and are usually symmetric, same up as down. Best you can get currently.
Cellular providers like Verizon and T-Mobile are upgrading their infrastructure to get higher speed connections to their towers. They are also upgrading their over the air protocols to "5G" (here the G is for generation, 5th generation). The higher speed connections to their towers allow them to allocate bandwidth for home Internet. The home Internet gateways are not mobile, you have to use them at your home, and they only offer it where they have the capacity for it. They typically offer similar speeds to recent cable connections, perhaps 100 Mbps down and often a bit more up than typical 10 Mbps cable. Although 100 Mbps is slower than 300 Mbps speeds offered by cable, 100 Mbps down is plenty. They may even be better for some applications when they can offer higher upload speeds. You may not get a public IP address, though, because they are likely to use "carrier grade NAT". If available in your area, may be a better deal than cable and definitely better than DSL. These connections may be sold as not having a data cap, but may slow down your traffic like some cell phone plans. Data caps are legitimate for shared resources like cellular bandwidth.
The first satellite technology used to offer broadband to rural areas. May require professional installation because you get a radio transmitter that can reach geosynchronous orbit. This technology is not the last mile, it is more the "last 22,000 plus miles" because that's how high the orbit is. Worse from higher latitudes (closer to the poles like much of the US) because the distance is even further and it goes through more of the atmosphere. Your ground station is aimed at a single satellite and everything you do over the Internet has to travel those distances. This technology is defined by cost, speed limits, rain fade, and latency. Latency is the delay in sending your request before you get a response. Even at the speed of light, traveling 22k+ miles up, 22k+ miles down, over the Internet, back over the Internet, then back up 22k+ miles and down 22k+ miles adds up. You can't use this for gaming or conferencing. Providers sell 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps speeds with perhaps 5 Mbps up, but the latency really affects the connection. Because satellite bandwidth is limited, there are often legitimate data caps.
SpaceX Starlink and similar systems combine satellite technology and cellular network technology to allow you to use which ever low orbit satellites are visible to your ground station. They can get more bandwidth by adding more satellites and with lower orbits the latency is much better. They are even working on providing cellular LTE signals from satellite to standard cellular phones. Starlink is more expensive than fixed point cellular and cable, but can offer similar speeds, depending on how many satellites cover your part of the Earth and how many other users there are. Good option for rural areas and will likely be the end of geosynchronous satellite Internet.