Affordable Internet Service Provider Options in Los Angeles

The quality of internet available for homes and apartments depends greatly on the neighborhood. Fiber internet expansion has been patchy, mostly led by AT&T, and focused on wealthier neighborhoods like Echo Park and Silverlake.¹

Residents in large multi-family buildings are generally limited to one provider, thanks to longstanding kickback programs by larger companies.² However some startups like Starry Internet have been winning over landlords and installing 200 Mbps services for apartment buildings around Central Los Angeles.

Here’s a full breakdown of internet options in Los Angeles, starting with the fastest types of service and working down:

Fiber Cable DSL Alternative ISPs Fixed Wireless

Fiber internet service in Los Angeles

Fiber internet is the fastest consumer internet option on the market, and enables download and upload speeds up to 1,000 Mbps. For context, that’s five times faster than the average cable plan in Los Angeles and more than 25 times the fastest cable company upload speed.

Unfortunately, fiber is not available citywide, and is particularly hard to get if you live in an apartment complex or low-income neighborhood.

While AT&T Los Angeles deals are the only major fiber option in Central, East, and West LA, there are several alternative fiber providers in the greater LA area and Los Angeles County.

Most notably, Frontier Fios services some parts of south LA and Santa Monica. Beverly Hills was scheduled to launch a municipal fiber network in Summer 2021³, but the project is now delayed indefinetly due to Covid-related city budget changes. Ting Internet operates a fiber network in Culver City.

Cable internet service in Los Angeles

Cable internet is the second-fastest home internet option. In LA, cable download speeds range from 300–1,000 Mbps. However, the upload speed of cable is lower than fiber; it caps out at 35 Mbps and is sufficient for Zoom calls but struggles when moving large files or uploading video.

Cable internet from Spectrum (formerly called Time Warner Cable) is available citywide in Los Angeles.

DSL internet service in Los Angeles

DSL internet is a widely-available fallback option for internet service in Los Angeles, but for most locations it’s a poor product relative to cable and fiber.

DSL speeds go up to 100 Mbps in theory. In practice, most locations locally are limited to 25 Mbps or lower in neighborhoods with older cabling like Koreatown and Frogtown. The upload speed is even lower, capping out at 5–10 Mbps and running as low as 1 Mbps in some parts of Central LA.

Internet alternatives in Los Angeles

Los Angeles has had a number of alternative services come and go over the past few years, including discussions of municipal providers and local nonprofit efforts like the Los Angeles Community Broadband Project.

As of 2023, the only real alternatives internet providers in Los Angeles are Earthlink and Sonic.

The big caveat with Earthlink and Sonic is that they don’t actually own any infrastructure in Los Angeles; they are simply reselling service over AT&T lines. This is similar to how Ting or US Cellular provide mobile service by leasing towers rather than building them. Earthlink and Sonic do the same thing, but with home internet lines.

The main benefit of using either of them is that it lets you skip AT&T’s customer service, which means better customer service and (often) cheaper pricing. In the case of Sonic in particular, that really improves the customer experience.

However, it also means that you’re limited to whatever speeds AT&T already offers at your address — and you might even be de-prioritized for technician visits. After all, AT&T has an incentive to service their own customers before reseller subscribers in the case of an outage.

Fixed Wireless internet service in Los Angeles

Fixed Wireless is a method of delivering internet service to homes using wireless technology like 5G. Prior to 2018, fixed wireless was a niche rural internet option with limited speeds and high prices.

In 2023, that’s no longer the case. Hardware advances have allowed companies like Starry Internet and Verizon to offer fixed wireless service that matches or exceeds the speeds from cable.

Mobile operators T-Mobile and Verizon have both launched their own version of this “fixed 5G” home internet service, although the service availability and quality is hard to predict given the reliance on small cell towers.

Low Income Internet Programs For Los Angeles Residents

Low-income residents in the greater Los Angeles area can access low-cost internet service from all the major providers including Spectrum, AT&T, Frontier, and Cox Cable.

However, qualifying for these plans can be complicated if you don’t already participate in a program like SNAP or live in public housing.

One of the big potential benefits of some of these plans is the chance to get a free computer or a computer for a very low price. This can be an enormous benefit in a household where a computer would normally just be too expensive to consider.

Spectrum Low Income Internet Program For Los Angeles Residents

Spectrum does not provide low income Internet services under the Federal or California Lifeline provisions. However, it does offer Spectrum Internet Assist.

Who Qualifies For Spectrum Internet Assist?

There are two qualifying groups for this service:

• Any family that has a student that uses the National School Lunch Program
• Any family that has a senior over the age of 65 that gets Supplemental Security Income

However, if you have any outstanding debts to Spectrum, Charter Spectrum or Time Warner Communications – they will not allow you to take Spectrum Internet Assist until these debts are cleared.

If you have previously had services from Charter, Spectrum, Time Warner or Bright House – you are in their coverage area. If you haven’t you may need to check on their website to see if your home is covered by the service – Spectrum is widely available throughout Los Angeles.

AT&T Low Income Internet Program For Los Angeles Residents

AT&T offers one of the lowest-cost low-income programs for Internet access in Los Angeles (and much of the US for that matter).

AT&T also offers services for people who qualify for Lifeline support — but the AT&T Access program which we are examining here is different and has more favorable terms, if you can qualify:

Who Qualifies For AT&T Access?

The qualification criteria for AT&T Access are:

• You must live in the AT&T coverage area
• One person in your household must be in receipt of food stamps on the SNAP program

However, as with Spectrum you must not have any outstanding debts incurred in the last six months to AT&T. We actually think that’s pretty reasonable – it’s much fairer than Spectrum’s lifetime exclusions, that’s for sure.

Frontier Low Income Internet Program For Los Angeles Residents

Frontier’s Low Income Internet program is possibly the best deal out there at the moment for low income individuals.

This should not be confused with Frontier’s Lifeline Internet plan which is also available. This is Frontier’s direct to consumer low-income plan, Fundamental Internet.

Who Qualifies For Frontier Fundamental Internet?

There are four ways to qualify for Frontier FI:

• If anyone in your family is a recipient of the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (CalFresh)
• If anyone in your home is a recipient of the Supplement Security Income (SSI) benefit
• If anyone in your home is on the Medi-Cal program
• If anyone in your family is on the Bureau of Indian Affairs Program

This is a broader range of qualifications than most other ISPs, making this plan overall more accessible.

Cox Communications Low Income Internet Program For Los Angeles Residents

Cox offers two different low income internet programs each with a different set of qualifying criteria to join.

Cox is not a Lifeline provider, so you can avail yourself of these plans and still claim a cellular phone on the Lifeline plan if you qualify.

Who Qualifies For The Cox Communications Low Income Internet Program?

• Anyone with a family member participating in the SNAP, TANF and National School Lunch Programs
• Anyone living in HUD-assisted housing with school-age children

You can’t sign up for Cox if:

• You’ve previously been a Cox customer in the last 3 months – if you qualify, you will need to cancel and then wait 90 days before you can sign up
• You have a previous Cox bill that is over 12 months old and unpaid
• You have any Cox cable equipment that you have not previously returned (you can, however, return it and then immediately qualify)

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Los Angeles Internet Access Statistics

Internet Infrastructure in Los Angeles

The table above shows percent coverage of each major network type in Los Angeles according to the latest FCC Form 477 data release (2023).⁴

Note that due to over-reporting by providers, coverage at the building level is not as robust as this data presents. Fixed wireless service from providers like Starry Internet, in particular, has much lower coverage than it appears based on FCC data sources — which are currently the only public source of national broadband data.

Los Angeles Internet Speeds

100–200 Mbps is a normal speed range for entry-level internet plans in Los Angeles. Spectrum’s 200 Mbps plan is one of the cheapest and most common choices, usually competing with 50–100 Mbps plans from AT&T. That said, A few LA neighborhoods including Silverlake and the Arts District have 1,000 Mbps speeds from AT&T Fiber.

If you’re trying to decide on a decent internet speed, 200 Mbps is sufficient for the majority of homes and apartments. However 1,000 Mbps “gigabit” fiber is often equivalent in price, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber available at your location. In general, fiber is available in denser areas like DTLA or wealthier neighborhoods like the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills area.

In most cases, I’ll recommend you go ahead and get fiber if it’s available — AT&T recently dropped data caps and year-long contract requirements for fiber plans, making them extra competitive against Spectrum.

Average Speed test result in Los Angeles

Regardless of the service speed advertised, what is the average internet speed in Los Angeles? In terms of actual speed once service is installed, the major speed test data sources like Measurement Labs suggest an average speed of around 50 Mbps in Los Angeles overall. In fact, the last 12 months of Measurement Labs tests at the time of this article was exactly 50.01 Mbps.

This is about twice as fast as the global average, though the average internet speed in the USA as a whole is surprisingly quite high at 60–90 Mbps depending on the test source and criteria.

In general, I recommend taking these test results with a grain of salt as they measure people’s WiFi performance as well as the internet connection. WiFi speeds can be dramatically lower than the actual wired internet connection at an address, since the connection is shared over the air rather than wired in directly to the source.

Additionally, people running speed tests are commonly troubleshooting local network — resulting in a large amount of tests that have more to do with bad routers than bad internet connections.

Overall, the 50 Mbps average speed test in Los Angeles is decent and most cable or fiber customers are more likely to have issues with their router and cabling than with the service bandwidth itself.

Known issues with LA speed test data

When we talk about a “normal internet speed” for Los Angeles, we’re really talking about an average speed. This number isn’t always helpful because:

1. There are a lot of choices in Los Angeles for internet service and some have much higher potential speed than others.
2. The speed you experience as a customer depends on the connection of your device to the router, and the capability of the modem and router to handle the speed delivered.

We’ve found that Measurement Labs, which provides Google’s speed test tool, shows an average speed of around 50 Mbps in Los Angeles. As mentioned, different speed tests use different criteria for measurement — I’ve seen credible speed test sources quote anywhere from 33 Mbps up to around 55 Mbps for the LA area average.

Speed measurement is a known issue in the internet industry, with industry reports commonly offering caveats around misleading figures. For example, research from nonprofit group IEEEXplore in 2015 showed that the numbers provided by a speed test could vary dramatically within the same household, on the same Internet connection or at different points during the day.⁵

This means that while there is an “average internet speed in Los Angeles” according to a lot of sources, those sources are only a loose indicator of what you’ll experience at home. In fact, the only meaningful number for a user is likely to be the results of a speed test on their own line at a specific time and day.

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Business internet services in Los Angeles

The greater Los Angeles area has several business centers including business districts in Pasadena, Culver City, and Playa Vista. However, most large tech headquarters are in "Silicon Beach," an area on the West Side of LA in Santa Monica and Venice Beach that features major headquarters like Google and Snapchat.

Tech companies are drawn to Silicon Beach, in part, by the infrastructure and broadband access. Aside from being a major data center location and cable landing site, Silicon Beach also is one of 7 locations in California with municipal broadband services for enterprises, including dark fiber availability and low-cost high-quality fiber connectivity from Santa Monica CityNet.

Low-coverage internet service providers in Los Angeles

The following providers have registered minor internet coverage areas within Los Angeles city limits, all below 1% local coverage.

CenturyLink enterprise, One Ring Networks, and several other major enterprise telecom providers are active in Silicon Beach and Los Angeles generally, making it the second-most popular location for startups and tech companies in California.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the average internet speed in Los Angeles?

According to ConnectCalifornia analysis of public speed test records, the average internet speed test in Los Angeles in 2023 is 82 Mbps. The most common entry-level internet speed in Los Angeles is 300 Mbps (the base tier from both Spectrum and AT&T Fiber), although the advertised speeds are rarely realized on consumer devices when WiFi and network load are taken into account.

Does Spectrum have plans for low-income Los Angeles residents?

Spectrum has a plan for low-income Los Angeles residents called Spectrum Internet Assist. The plan offers 30 Mbps download internet speeds for less than $20 per month. It costs about twice as much as the competing low-income plan from AT&T in LA, but offers 3X the speed.

What is the cheapest internet option in Los Angeles?

AT&T has the absolute lowest internet price for Los Angeles low income residents, thanks to their subsidized AT&T Access plan. They offer 10 Mbps internet for only $10 per month with no contract and a free WiFi router lease included. You must already participate in a qualifying public assistance program like SNAP to access the plan. Otherwise, they offer general consumer plans starting in the $55–80 range with speeds up to 1,000 Mbps.