Alaska named America’s largest internet desert
Published 4:30 am Saturday, July 25, 2026
New nationwide analysis has revealed that Alaska ranks as America’s largest internet desert, an area with limited or no high-speed internet due to remote geography.
CompareInternet.com built the 2026 State Internet Index to discover which states actually deliver on home broadband, and which ones are leaving people behind.
The index scored all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico using the FCC’s own Broadband Data Collection, the federal government’s location-by-location record of where internet providers report offering service, and the same dataset used for the $42.45 billion federal BEAD broadband program.
Alaska ranked dead last with an internet score of zero out of 100, ranking last on every metric that was measured, with just 71.5 percent high-speed access, 14.2 percent fiber access, 12.5 percent gigabit access, and a 60-point gap between its cities and everywhere else.
The score weighs four measures of residential wired broadband: high-speed access at 100/20 megabits per second (Mbps) at 35 per cent, fiber access at 25 percent, gigabit access at 1000/100 Mbps at 20 percent, and urban-rural equity which is the gap between a state’s urban and rural high-speed access rates at 20 percent.
Each metric is then normalized against all 52 jurisdictions before weighting, so no single state’s raw numbers can distort the scale.
“We stress-tested this weighting under four alternative schemes (equal weighting, equity-heavy, speed-only, fiber-heavy),” the analysis read. “In every version, the top five and bottom five states remained essentially the same, with rank correlations between 0.89 and 1.00 against the primary methodology.”
Lowest-ranked states for home internetAlaska: 0.0
New Mexico: 28.4
Idaho: 30.3
Montana: 31.6
Wyoming: 31.7
Arizona: 42.7
West Virginia: 43.0
Washington: 52.2
California: 53.8
Wisconsin: 54.4
Alaska and the rest of the top five qualify outright as internet deserts.
North Dakota has the best home internet in the country, with an internet score of 94.1. A total of 99.2 percent of homes get high-speed service, and there is almost no gap between city and countryside access.
Connecticut, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey round out the top five.
“What these states have in common isn’t wealth or population density — it’s consistency,” CompareInternet.com added. “They didn’t just wire their cities — they wired everywhere.”
Nationally, 97.5 percent of city dwellers have high-speed internet, but only 76.5 percent of rural residents have access — a 21-point gap. Fiber internet, the fastest and most future-proof home internet technology, only reaches 55.8 percent of U.S. homes.
