Internet plan comparison tool

Internet ads lead with the promo price because that’s the number that looks best. A typical cable offer reads something like $35/mo for 300 Mbps. What the fine print doesn’t bury, because it technically isn’t required to, is that after 12 months the promo ends and the price jumps to the regular rate, often in the $65 to $80 range. A $15 equipment fee gets added on top for most operators unless you own your modem. Two years in, the plan that was “$35” has actually cost you closer to $1,200 to $1,500.

Fiber plays the same game in a quieter key. Promo pricing on fiber is usually a 2-year price lock rather than a 12-month cliff, but the locked-in rate is almost always higher than the cable promo. A $80 fiber plan is a better value than a $35 cable plan once the 24-month dust settles, because the cable plan spends 12 of those months at $80 anyway, and the fiber plan is symmetrical, uncapped, and typically ships with no equipment fee.

5G home internet and satellite are the simpler cases, flat pricing, no promo cliff, usually no equipment fee. T-Mobile and Verizon 5G hover around $50/mo, Starlink is closer to $120/mo. Those numbers don’t move across 24 months, so the 2-year total is just the monthly rate times 24.

The comparison grid above flattens all four connection types into one scanable view, with 2-year true cost as the visual anchor. The plan with the lowest 24-month total gets a green highlight so you can pick the winner in a single glance. If a promo rate, a data cap, or an equipment fee is working against a plan, the grid will show you exactly where.

Promo price is what you pay during the intro window. Regular priceis what kicks in after that. If both numbers are equal, the plan either has a 2-year price lock (fiber) or is flat-rate (5G home, satellite), that’s a good sign.

Contract tells you if there’s an early-termination risk. Download and upload speeds are in megabits per second, fiber is usually symmetrical, cable and 5G home are not.

Data cap and equipment feeare the sneaky line items. A “cheap” cable plan with a 1,200 GB cap and a $15 router fee is meaningfully more expensive than a flat-rate fiber plan that advertises $20 higher up front.

Everything under highlights is plan-specific, WiFi 6E gateway included, symmetrical 1 Gbps, no-contract, and so on. Use those to break ties after the 2-year true cost narrows your shortlist.

The formula is deliberately simple so the number is defensible, promo monthly price times the promo window (capped at 24 months), plus the regular monthly price times the remaining months out of 24, plus the monthly equipment fee times 24. Cable plans assume the standard 12-month promo. Fiber and flat-rate plans use the same price for both halves of the calculation, there’s no post-promo jump to account for.

We exclude one-time fees (install, activation, hardware purchase like the Starlink kit) because they vary by how you sign up and by whether a promo is running. We also exclude tax, which varies by city and county. Where these one-time costs are meaningful, Starlink’s $349 hardware, for example, they’re called out in the plan’s highlights.

If your real bill comes in higher than the 2-year number we show, the usual culprits are a bundle discount that silently expired, a rate hike between order time and activation, or a local broadband-infrastructure surcharge in your city.

If it comes in lower, it’s usually a retention discount a CSR threw in at activation, a promo that got extended, or a bundle with wireless from the same carrier.