Best Internet Providers in Arlington, Texas

If you’re shopping for the best internet provider in Arlington, your first step should be to enter your address on AT&T’s website. Can you get its fiber internet service at your house? If the answer’s yes, your search is over. With ultrafast upload and download speeds and reasonable prices, AT&T Fiber is the best internet provider for most households in Arlington. If it’s not available at your address, both Spectrum and T-Mobile are passable, although imperfect, second choices.

Top internet providers in Arlington

The best internet providers offer fast speeds at affordable rates, and have a track record of satisfying customers. In Arlington, the lone ISP that checks all those boxes is AT&T Fiber.

Source: CNET analysis of provider data.

Other available Arlington residential internet providers

• Nextlink: Nextlink’s two fixed wireless plans are available to 21% of Arlington households. You can get 25/5Mbps for $40 monthly or 50/10Mbps for $60. Nextlink offers the first month of service for free and both plans come with unlimited data, but you’ll have to sign a two-year contract to get the best price. Fixed wireless is a slightly better option than satellite internet in terms of speed and reliability, but Verizon and T-Mobile are much stronger fixed wireless options. 
• Satellite internet: Satellite internet is usually your last resort if you live in a rural area and can’t get anything else. HughesNet and Viasat are available everywhere in Arlington, but you’ll have to deal with slow speeds, high prices and low data caps. Starlink satellite internet is faster but extremely expensive at $120 per month for service plus $599 upfront for the equipment.
• Verizon 5G Home Internet: Verizon’s service is comparable to T-Mobile’s, which is our pick for the best fixed wireless internet in Arlington. Both use cellular towers to provide connectivity, but Verizon’s 5G network delivers faster speed. The downside? Less than half of Arlington is covered by Verizon 5G Home Internet.

Pricing for internet providers in Arlington

Residents of Arlington can expect to pay between $50 to $80 for internet plans with speeds up to 1Gbps. Spectrum has the cheapest plans in the area, but the monthly prices increase significantly in the second or third year. Low-income households can take advantage of the Affordable Connectivity Program’s federal subsidy that provides a $30 per month discount on home internet. 

Source: CNET analysis of provider data.

How fast is Arlington broadband?

Arlington residents can expect median download speeds of 232Mbps and upload speeds of 22Mbps, according to Ookla speed test results. That’s about on par with Texas (209/28Mbps) and the US as a whole (210/24Mbps). Arlington also ranks ahead of nearby Fort Worth and Dallas for download speed.

Source: CNET analysis of provider data.

How CNET chose the best internet providers in Arlington

Internet service providers are numerous and regional. Unlike the latest smartphone, laptop, router or kitchen tool, it’s impractical to personally test every internet service provider in a given city. What’s our approach? For starters, we tap into a proprietary database of pricing, availability and speed information that draws from our own historical ISP data, partner data and mapping information from the Federal Communications Commission at FCC.gov. 

This guide leverages an in-house artificial intelligence tool called RAMP, which is trained on our own writing and uses our database to generate content about specific internet service providers that our writers can use in determining and presenting our picks for a given guide. Check CNET’s AI policy for more information about how our teams use (and don’t use) AI tools. 

Because our database is not exhaustive, we go to the FCC’s website to check the primary data for ourselves and make sure we’re considering every ISP that provides service in an area. Plans and prices also vary by location, so we input local addresses on provider websites to find the specific options available to residents. We look at sources, including the American Customer Satisfaction Index and J.D. Power, to evaluate how happy customers are with an ISP’s service. ISP plans and prices are subject to frequent changes; all information provided is accurate as of the time of our prepublication fact-check.

Once we have this localized information, we ask three main questions: 

1. Does the provider offer access to reasonably fast internet speeds? 
2. Do customers get decent value for what they’re paying? 
3. Are customers happy with their service? 

The answer to those questions is often layered and complex, but the providers who come closest to “yes” on all three are the ones we recommend. To explore our process in more depth, you can visit our page on how we test ISPs.

What’s the final word on internet providers in Arlington?

Fast internet is widely available in Arlington — 95% of the city can get 250Mbps speeds, compared to 83% of Texas — but residents don’t have as many options as they do in other cities. AT&T Fiber is widely available, and if you can get it, you should. It’s the only ISP in the area that has symmetrical upload and download speeds, and the monthly prices are reasonable — and don’t automatically increase over time the way Spectrum’s sometimes do. T-Mobile Home Internet offers an affordable option throughout Arlington, but it doesn’t offer the same high speeds as AT&T and Spectrum.

Internet providers in Arlington FAQs