St. Louis internet FAQs

From Busch Stadium to the Gateway Arch, the St. Louis metropolitan area is home to about 2.8 million residents, making it one of the largest metro regions in the Midwest. Everyone needs access to the internet to stay connected these days, so what are the best internet providers St. Louis offers its residents?

If you’re looking for internet service, you’ll find a variety of options for getting online, including cable connections, fixed wireless services, high-speed fiber hookups and new options like 5G home internet. Still, you’ll need to check what’s available at your address before you sign up for anything.

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You can plug your ZIP code into the tool below to do exactly that, but you’ve come to the right post if you need additional help understanding your options. Keep reading for a full rundown of the top internet providers in St. Louis and a breakdown of the fastest and most affordable internet plans in the area so you can find the best internet provider to fit your needs.

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AT&T

Best fiber service among internet providers in St. Louis

Missouri is a middle-of-the-pack state as far as fiber internet availability is concerned. Still, you will find fiber connections from AT&T available to hundreds of thousands of customers in select parts of the St. Louis area. It’s the city’s only major fiber provider, and service is limited to homes that are wired accordingly, but after a quick scan, I was able to find pockets of fiber availability in multiple neighborhoods, including University City, Sycamore Hills, Northwoods, Dutchtown, Brentwood and other areas. If it’s available at your address, it should definitely be one of the first options you consider.

For starters, AT&T Fiber offers fast, symmetrical upload and download speeds starting at 300 megabits per second, and gigabit service with download speeds of 940Mbps and upload speeds of 880Mbps is available across all fiber-eligible addresses in the area. The company’s new, ultrafast multigig plans aren’t widely available in St. Louis yet, but a company spokesperson said, “AT&T will continue to roll out multigig speeds across its fiber footprint and densify fiber in the St. Louis area” throughout 2022.

As for value, AT&T Fiber prices range from $55 to $80 per month with no data caps, no contracts and no set price increase after 12 months, which is a rarity in home internet. You’ll also frequently find bonus offers from AT&T for signing up online. All of that, coupled with a relatively strong customer satisfaction track record from organizations like JD Power and the American Customer Satisfaction Index, is why AT&T Fiber is one of CNET’s top-recommended internet services overall.

If AT&T doesn’t offer fiber service at your address, there’s a very good chance that you’ll have access to one of AT&T’s DSL internet plans instead. Those are much, much slower than fiber (or cable, for that matter), and unlike the company’s fiber plans, they include data caps and fixed price increases at 12 months. You’ll want to seek something better if that’s all that’s available (keep reading for suggestions), but put it right at the top of your list if AT&T Fiber is an option.

Read our AT&T home internet review.

 

AT&T Home Internet

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Spectrum

Best high-speed availability among internet providers in St. Louis

If fiber isn’t available at your address, cable internet is likely your next best option. Spectrum boasts the best availability throughout the area — and it’s also CNET’s top-recommended cable internet provider, thanks to high speeds, reasonable rates, low equipment costs and no data caps whatsoever.

Specifically, Spectrum’s cable internet packages range in download speed from 200Mbps to 940Mbps, though the upload speeds are much slower, coming in at 10Mbps to 35Mbps. You can expect to pay $50 to $90 per month during your first year and $75 to $115 per month after that, plus a $5 monthly fee if you need to rent a router. With no data caps, no contracts and no additional recurring fees to worry about, Spectrum simplifies home internet a lot better than most competitors — making it a very solid choice.

Read our Spectrum home internet review.

 

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Verizon

Verizon

Best 5G wireless option among internet providers in St. Louis

Connecting your home to the internet over 5G wireless airwaves is a relatively new trend in broadband, and you’ll find service available in St. Louis from both Verizon and T-Mobile, as well as smaller providers like Ultra and King Street Wireless that lease airwaves for resale. Whether or not it’s an option at your address depends on whether you’ve got a signal that’s strong enough to support home broadband use, so you’ll need to check to see which providers, if any, are an option at your address.

Between them all, your best bet is to start with Verizon, which offers both 5G and 4G/LTE fixed-wireless services. With limited speeds, the latter is nothing to get too excited about, but if the signal is strong enough at your address to support 5G service, you’re in luck because Verizon’s 5G home internet offers the potential for near-gigabit download speeds with no data caps at an appealing flat rate of $50 per month with a two-year price guarantee, or $70 per month if you want to make that a three-year price guarantee. Either way, you can cut your bill in half and make that $25 or $35 per month if you’ve already got a qualifying Verizon mobile plan.

Speeds like those depend upon Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband coverage — but according to the company’s service map, St. Louis is pretty well-covered (just check out the abundance of dark red in the coverage map above). That means that St. Louis residents have better odds than most of finding a fast signal available at their address, so it’s worth checking to see if service is available.

Read our Verizon 5G Home Internet review.

 

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Other internet providers in St. Louis

Our recommended providers should cover the majority of internet customers in St. Louis, but they aren’t the only game in town. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the other providers offering service in the area.

Brown Dog Networks
A local fixed wireless provider based in St. Louis, Brown Dog Networks can’t claim to offer fast speeds for everyone. At $55 per month, its cheapest residential plan offers download speeds that top out at 768 kilobits per second (less than 1Mbps), and the company’s fastest residential plan only offers downloads of up to 3Mbps. 

Still, the company tells CNET that its plans for apartment complexes and other multidwelling units offer download speeds as high as 120Mbps at tax-included rates of $25 to $50 per month, and that’s without data caps or preplanned price increases. Plus, the company’s local footprint covers a decent chunk of the St. Louis market west of the Mississippi, including rural internet access in Jefferson and Franklin counties. Suppose you’re at an underserviced address without access to wired fiber, cable service or a usable 5G signal; in that case, Brown Dog might be worth a look as a less expensive alternative to satellite internet.

EarthLink
EarthLink’s been around for decades, but these days, it leases internet infrastructure and wireless airwaves from other providers to resell home internet plans to consumers, including in St. Louis. As such, the company offers a mix of plans that use different technologies, from satellite to fiber to fixed wireless. EarthLink’s offerings typically offer slightly less value than the primary providers themselves, and since the company doesn’t control the infrastructure, customers are left to the mercy of primary providers when it comes to things like network slowdowns.

That means EarthLink usually isn’t your best bet for a fast, reliable connection at the best value. To the company’s credit, it doesn’t enforce data caps of prescheduled price increases on its plans, so you could probably do worse if you’re living somewhere without many options.

Satellite internet
Satellite internet services from HughesNet and Viasat are available just about everywhere, but with high costs, long contracts and limited speeds, neither one amounts to much more than a last resort for homes where literally nothing else is available. Between them, Viasat offers the potential for higher speeds, with downloads capped at 100Mbps as opposed to HughesNet’s 25Mbps, but the monthly costs are higher. Either way, you’ll need to pay hundreds up front to buy your equipment, and you can expect your speeds to come crashing down if you exceed a stingy data cap.

Depending on your address, you might also have access to Starlink, the satellite internet service from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Speeds are higher and latency is lower thanks to Starlink’s low-earth orbit satellites, which don’t require your signal to travel quite so far, but the costs are still sky-high at $110 per month and $599 up front. Availability is a problem, as well: In some regions, Starlink currently says it may not be able to fulfill new requests for service at eligible addresses until 2023 or later.

Suddenlink
Like Spectrum, Suddenlink offers cable internet service without data caps, which is appealing. In fact, the company’s first-year pricing is about as enticing as home internet gets, with gigabit download speeds available for just $80 per month. Prices soar after the first year, though (up to $140 per month for that gigabit plan). On top of that, availability in St. Louis is quite slim, as it’s limited mostly to select areas around Des Peres and Manchester. That means that Suddenlink isn’t likely to be available at your address. Even if it is, we’d recommend shopping around for a better long-term value.

T-Mobile
Like Verizon, T-Mobile offers fixed wireless home internet service over the same airwaves it uses to offer mobile connectivity, including 5G. Top speeds aren’t quite as high as Verizon’s, with downloads maxing out at 182Mbps and uploads at 35Mbps, but the value is still pretty strong — $50 per month with no data caps and no price increase at 12 months. On top of that, a new T-Mobile Home Internet Lite option is available anywhere you can get a T-Mobile signal at all, though that option comes with a tight data cap of just 100GB per month — use more data than that in a given month, and T-Mobile will throttle your speeds down to painfully slow, 2G levels of service.

Still, T-Mobile is well worth considering if faster fiber and cable plans aren’t available at your address, but Verizon offers plenty of availability in St. Louis and faster top speeds for the same monthly price, so I’d recommend starting there first.

Ultra Home Internet
Speaking of T-Mobile, another option offering home internet services in the St. Louis area is Ultra Home Internet, which leases wireless airwaves from T-Mobile to resell the same essential services. The problem is that Ultra’s store-brand cellular internet plans offer a lot less value than going direct with T-Mobile.

Instead of a flat rate of $50 per month with no data caps, Ultra offers the same speeds in four plans, starting at $55 per month with a very tight 25GB data cap. You can pay $80 per month instead to double that data cap to 50GB, or you can go with an “unlimited data” plan for $120 or $145 per month. Don’t let the name fool you, though — those still come with data caps (75GB and 100GB, respectively). The only difference is that Ultra will throttle your speed as much as it wants when you break the data cap on the first two plans, but when you break the cap with the “unlimited” plans, it’ll only throttle you down to speeds of 1Mbps. Gee, thanks.

Wisper Internet
Wisper is a regional fixed-wireless provider headquartered in Mascoutah, Illinois, and it’s been spending the past few years working to expand service throughout rural parts of Missouri, with antennas mounted up high on installations like water towers and grain elevators to deliver wireless internet service where other options might not be available. The company now says that it serves roughly 20,000 customers across Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Indiana.

Service is still most prevalent east of the Mississippi in Illinois, in places like East St. Louis and Caseyville. With plans starting at $65 per month, download speeds of up to 400Mbps and no data caps or prescheduled price increases, it’s worth taking a look to see if Wisper is an option in the rural areas surrounding St. Louis.

What are the least expensive internet plans in St. Louis?

Just looking for the cheapest plans possible? If you’re trying to minimize your bill while staying online, here’s what you’ll find:

The takeaway from that chart is that, in most cases, you should expect to spend at least $50 per month for home internet service in St. Louis. The only plan that costs less than that is from Suddenlink, which offers a first-year rate of $40 per month on its cheapest plan. Even then, that price shoots up to $110 after the first year, so it’s less of a bargain than a bait and switch.

Again, the best deal is AT&T Fiber, which offers symmetrical upload and download speeds of 300Mbps for $55 per month with no price increase after year one and no data caps. Verizon and T-Mobile offer good value, too, with fixed rates of $50 per month for their cellular internet services and no data caps. Verizon might be particularly appealing if you have an existing Verizon mobile plan, as you might qualify for a 50% discount on your internet bill, bringing your monthly price down to $25.

The Affordable Connectivity Program can help low-income households

The Affordable Connectivity Program is a federal broadband benefit signed into law back in November 2021, and it offers eligible low-income households a $30 monthly discount on their internet bill. The wide majority of major providers are taking part in the program, and most make it pretty easy to sign up and put it to work. For instance, both AT&T and Spectrum offer ACP customers a 100Mbps plan for $30 per month — once the benefit kicks in, those plans are essentially free.

For more on the ACP, you can click here to see if you qualify or click here to see a full list of participating providers in Missouri, and you can check out the links below for provider-specific instructions on how to sign up:

• AT&T
• Earthlink
• Spectrum
• T-Mobile
• Verizon
• Wisper Internet

What are the fastest internet plans in St. Louis?

Nationwide, the fastest internet plans come from companies that offer multigig service, with speeds as high as 5 gigabits per second (5,000Mbps) or more. That includes AT&T, and the company tells CNET that its multigig plans are available to “thousands of customers” in the St. Louis area — but for now, the wide majority of fiber-eligible addresses in St. Louis will only have access to speeds as high as 940Mbps.

That’s about as fast as internet speeds in St. Louis currently get. Verizon technically offers top download speeds that are slightly faster at 1,000Mbps, but those speeds are entirely dependent upon the strength of the signal at your address, so it’s unlikely that you’ll hit speeds like that with any sort of consistency. And, unlike fiber internet plans, your upload speeds with Verizon will be much, much lower. The same goes for the fastest cable plans from Spectrum and Suddenlink — they can each match AT&T Fiber’s top St. Louis download speed of 940Mbps, but the upload speed is limited to just 35Mbps. With a fiber plan, your uploads will be just as fast as your downloads.

St. Louis internet FAQs