South Dakota Broadband Data

What the FCC Data Shows for South Dakota

South Dakota has 59 distinct broadband providers on file with the FCC and 429,732 total deployment records across all technology types. The state's average maximum advertised download speed sits at 123.2 Mbps — at or above the federal 100/20 Mbps broadband 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 South Dakota is led by fiber, with fiber accounting for 11.0% of filings, cable 2.2%, and DSL 8.5%. 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 South Dakota at 88,360, with Hughes Network Systems, LLC second at 84,873. The dominant technology line by filing count is Fixed Wireless Licensed, which alone accounts for 258,106 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.