What Internet Speed Can I Actually Get at My Address?

There are two answers to "what internet speed can I get here?" and they almost never match. One is the number an ISP prints on a coverage map. The other is what the speed tests people actually ran on that street recorded. SignalScout gives you the second one.

Advertised, available, and actual are three different numbers

Before you can judge an address, you need to know which of three claims you are looking at.

• Advertised speed is the top tier an ISP sells in that market. It is a best case: wired, one device, off-peak, and usually described as "up to".
• Available service is what a provider has filed with the FCC saying it does serve, or could serve within ten business days, at a given location. It is a self-reported claim about capability, not a measurement.
• Actual measured speed is what real connections at real houses returned when someone hit "go" on a speed test.

The gap between the first two and the third is the whole reason this tool exists. An area can be listed as having gigabit cable while the median measured download across it is 95 Mbps and the median upload is 12 Mbps. Both statements can be true at once: gigabit is sold there, and almost nobody buys it or gets it.

Where the measured numbers come from

SignalScout uses Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open measurement platform that releases every result into the public domain. M-Lab measures throughput to its own servers using the NDT protocol and publishes aggregated statistics by US county, which is the finest geography it makes openly available. Each county carries the median download, median upload, median latency, and the number of measurements behind it. The site bundles the 2024 county statistics — M-Lab's newest published vintage — with state-level series going back to 2020.

The lookup chain is simple: your address goes to the US Census Geocoder, which returns coordinates and the county the address falls in, and that county's measured statistics come from a dataset bundled with the site. There is one measured picture rather than two, because the open county statistics carry no separate mobile or cellular breakdown.

Reading your county's numbers

Upload deserves special attention. Download speeds have inflated across every technology, so a healthy download median tells you relatively little about what is in the ground. Upload separates the technologies sharply, and it is the number that breaks first when you are on a work call.

What the Connectivity Score means

The 0–100 Connectivity Score is a percentile rank: it places your county against every other US county, weighting download 60%, upload 25% and latency 15%. A score near 50 means the area is roughly typical for the United States. The download reference points behind it:

Two things fall out of that table. First, these are M-Lab's NDT figures, which sit well below the numbers on an ISP's marketing page, so the rank matters more than the raw megabits — a county measuring 96 Mbps is in the top quarter of the country. Second, the bottom decile is genuinely rough: in a county with a 38 Mbps median, plenty of households are below that, and 38 Mbps shared with two people on calls is a daily argument.

The limits, stated plainly

Measured data answers a different question from availability data, and it has its own blind spots.

• SignalScout does not list which ISPs serve your address. The FCC's provider-availability dataset needs a registered account for bulk download and the per-address API on the FCC map is bot-blocked, so provider lists are a planned addition rather than a current feature.
• A median reflects the plans neighbours bought, not the best plan sold. A county full of cheap 100 Mbps plans will show a slow median even where gigabit is on the pole.
• County is not your street. County is the finest geography M-Lab publishes openly, so one figure covers fast and slow neighbourhoods alike. It describes the area you are moving to, not the line that will terminate at your wall.
• Thin samples are noisy. A rural county's median can rest on a few hundred measurements, and below 300 it is reported as "Not enough data" rather than guessed at.
• Speed tests measure the whole path. Plenty of them run over old Wi-Fi on tired laptops, which drags medians below what the line can actually do.
• It is not a test of your own connection. It is a record of other people's.

What to do with the answer

Use the number as a floor and a filter, not a verdict. If the county shows a 12 Mbps median upload, treat gigabit-fiber claims at that address with suspicion until a provider gives you a written install commitment. If upload sits close to download, say 80 up against 95 down, fiber is widespread in that area and worth chasing. If you are weighing two places, put them side by side with the compare tool, and if the official map disagrees with what you are seeing, the filed-versus-measured explainer covers why that happens so often.

Common questions