Best Internet Providers in St. Louis, Missouri

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.

You can plug your ZIP code into the tool on the right side of this article to do exactly that, and you’ve come to the best place 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.

The top internet service providers in St. Louis

Following extensive research into the respective plans, prices, speeds, terms and technologies of each of the major internet players in the St. Louis area, here are the providers we think you should turn to first.

Note: The prices, speeds and features detailed in the article text may differ from those listed in the product detail cards, which represent providers’ national offerings. Your particular internet service options — including prices and speeds — depend on your address and may differ from those detailed here.

Speed range

100 – 1,000 Mbps

Price range

$30- $90 per month

Our take – If fiber isn’t available at your address, cable internet is likely your next best option.

. . . Or call to learn more: (833) 464-0962

Check with Spectrum

Speed range

100 – 1,000 Mbps

Price range

$30- $90 per month

Show more details

Speed range

300 – 5,000 Mbps

Price range

$55 – $250 per month

Our take – 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.

. . . Or call to learn more: (866) 431-6052

Check with AT&T

Speed range

300 – 5,000 Mbps

Price range

$55 – $250 per month

Show more details

Connection

Fixed wireless

Speed range

85 – 1,000 Mbps

Price range

$50 – $70 per month

Our take – 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 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.

. . . Or call to learn more: (844) 634-4339

Check with Verizon

Connection

Fixed wireless

Speed range

85 – 1,000 Mbps

Price range

$50 – $70 per month

Show more details

Source: CNET analysis of provider data.

Other available internet providers in St. Louis

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 or prescheduled price increases on its plans, so you could probably do worse if you’re living somewhere without many options.

Optimum
Optimum, formerly known as 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 300Mbps download speeds available for just $40 per month. Prices soar after the first year, though. 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 Optimum isn’t likely to be available at your address. Even if it is, we’d recommend shopping around for a better long-term value.

Satellite internet
Satellite internet services from HughesNet and Viasat are available just about everywhere, but with high costs, long contracts and limited speeds, neither 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 150Mbps as opposed to HughesNet’s 50Mbps, 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 later in the year.

T-Mobile Home Internet
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 245Mbps and uploads at 23Mbps, but the value is still pretty strong — $50 per month with no data caps and no price increase at 12 months.

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.

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 $75 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 cheapest 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:

Source: CNET analysis of provider data.

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 Optimum, which offers a first-year rate of $40 per month on its cheapest plan. Even then, that price shoots up to $65 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 discount on your internet bill, bringing your monthly price down to $35 to $45.

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:

What are the fastest internet plans in St. Louis?

Nationwide, the fastest internet plans come from companies that offer multi-gig 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 1,000Mbps.

Source: CNET analysis of provider data.

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 plan from Spectrum — it can match AT&T Fiber’s top St. Louis download speed of 1,000, but the upload speed is limited to just 35Mbps. With a fiber plan, your uploads will be just as fast as your downloads.

How CNET chose the best internet providers in St. Louis

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. So 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. 

But it doesn’t end there. We go to the FCC’s website to check our data and ensure we consider every ISP that provides service in an area. We also input local addresses on provider websites to find specific options for 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 publication. 

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

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

While the answer to those questions is often layered and complex, the providers who come closest to “yes” on all three are the ones we recommend. When selecting the cheapest internet service, we look for the plans with the lowest monthly fee, though we also factor in things like price increases, equipment fees and contracts. Choosing the fastest internet service is relatively straightforward. We look at advertised upload and download speeds and consider real-world speed data from sources like Ookla and FCC reports.

To explore our process in more depth, visit our how we test ISPs page.

Internet providers in St. Louis FAQs