The US cities where cable is still the only real wired internet
Across 491 US cities, 42 have cable available to more than 80% of homes while fiber reaches no more than a quarter. Between them, 2,321,523 housing units have no fiber option at all.
What we measured
Internet providers are required to report to the FCC where they could install service within ten business days. We took those filings for 491 US cities and looked for places with a particular shape: cable available to almost everyone, fiber available to almost nobody. Specifically, cable reaching at least 80% of housing units at 100 Mbps or better, and fiber reaching no more than 25% at the same threshold.
42 cities match, holding 2,717,060 housing units between them — of which 2,321,523 have no fiber option at all. These are not rural areas or small towns — the list is led by Detroit, Baltimore and Albuquerque, each with more than 280,000 housing units. In every one of them, a resident who wants a fast wired connection has effectively one company to call.
This is a different problem from the one broadband policy usually addresses. Nobody in these cities is unserved. They have coverage, often at gigabit download speeds. What they do not have is an alternative, or symmetrical upload speeds, or the price pressure that a second wired provider creates.
Why upload speed is the tell
Cable networks were built to deliver television, which is a one-way product. The technology has been extended to carry internet very capably in the download direction, but upload capacity remains a fraction of it. Fiber has no such asymmetry: a gigabit fiber connection sends data out as fast as it pulls it in.
That difference has grown more consequential as work moved into the home. Video calls, cloud backup, large file transfers and anything involving a camera all depend on upload. A city where the only wired option is cable is a city where remote work runs on the weaker half of the connection.
The full list
Ranked by housing units. Coverage figures are the share of housing units where a provider reports it could deliver 100 Mbps down and 20 up. Values below 0.5% are shown as <1% rather than rounded to zero.
Caveats worth stating
These are provider filings, not measurements. A company reports where it believes it could install service within ten business days, which is not the same as where service works well, or where anyone is connected. Coverage figures in this dataset should be read as claims made under a federal reporting obligation rather than as verified availability.
Our city set covers the largest cities in each state, so this analysis says nothing about rural coverage — where the problem is usually absence of service rather than absence of choice. And fiber construction is ongoing: a city low on this list today may not be in twelve months.
Finally, fixed wireless and satellite are excluded deliberately. Both are real options and both appear on our city pages, but neither is a wired connection, and the question here was specifically about wired choice.
Using this data
The underlying figures come from the FCC Broadband Data Collection and are public. If you are a journalist, researcher or municipal broadband office and want the per-city breakdown behind this analysis, or the same cut for a city not listed here, get in touch — we will send it over. Please credit ShopHighSpeed and link to this page if you publish from it.