Montana Broadband Data

What the FCC Data Shows for Montana

Montana has 51 distinct broadband providers on file with the FCC and 569,696 total deployment records across all technology types. The state's average maximum advertised download speed sits at 83.0 Mbps — above the legacy 25/3 Mbps broadband threshold but below the modern 100/20 benchmark. That headline figure is the mean across every filing, so it weights provider-by-census-block records equally rather than weighting by population, which means rural filings pull the average as much as urban ones.

The technology mix in Montana is led by DSL, with fiber accounting for 4.7% of filings, cable 4.5%, and DSL 9.6%. Fiber share is the single best indicator of future-proofed infrastructure because fiber supports symmetric multi-gigabit speeds and scales without rewiring; cable share signals incumbent coverage in suburbs and cities; DSL share typically correlates with legacy copper footprints in smaller towns and rural pockets where no newer technology has arrived yet.

ViaSat, Inc. files the most deployment records in Montana at 132,288, with Hughes Network Systems, LLC second at 125,989. The dominant technology line by filing count is Fixed Wireless Licensed, which alone accounts for 384,266 records. Remember that Form 477 counts provider filings, not homes actually connected, so a block with five providers shows up as five records — useful for measuring competition and coverage breadth, but not a direct proxy for subscriber counts or real-world speeds at any specific address.