Rani Molla

AT&T is the fastest US mobile provider but probably not by as much as first reported, according to new information from speed-test company Ookla. AT&T’s overall mobile speed was artificially inflated in Ookla’s latest speed ratings by the sheer number of people testing their new “5G E” connections, whose icon notificat

The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies (studios) — made stuff (TV shows and movies) and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers. Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, recently completed its purchase of 21st Century Fox. Distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner, are becoming media companies, too.

High-speed internet is not really available where the government says it is. And that misinformation means that a lot of Americans, especially those in poor and rural areas, can’t get access to broadband — a service that is becoming more and more integral to daily life in the US. “Currently in the US, the focus is upon physical infrastructure, not upon people choosing to subscribe or being able to subscribe,” said Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, a nonprofit advocating for national broadband access.

It’s finally happening: In 2019, people around the world will spend more time online than they do watching TV, according to new data from measurement company Zenith. In 2019, people are expected to spend an average of 170.6 minutes each day on online activities like watching videos on YouTube, sharing photos on Facebook and shopping on Amazon. They’ll spend slightly less time — 170.3 minutes —watching TV. The global transition from TV to internet as the main entertainment medium was a long time coming, but it also happened faster than expected.

Facebook spent more money lobbying the US government in the first quarter of 2018 than it ever has before, according to a new filing. The social media company forked over $3.3 million to steer lawmakers on privacy, security, online advertising and transparency efforts, among other issues.

Comcast used to be the biggest cable TV company in the US. And it still is. But now it’s something more important: It’s the biggest broadband company in the US. The company announced it has 22.5 million TV subscribers and 25.1 million broadband subscribers. That puts it a couple million subscribers ahead of Charter, its nearest competitor for internet access, and well ahead of everyone else.

If your Internet speed feels too slow, it probably is. Most major US Internet service providers usually deliver slower speeds than they advertise to their customers.

Indeed, the vast majority of the 800 cities included in the sortable table below experience median Internet speeds that are slower than what their providers advertise, according to data provided by Ookla and its online speed test, Speedtest.net.

Ookla, which previously licensed its data and technology to the Federal Communications Commission, compiled the data from tens of millions of speed tests as well as surveys of 646,404 Speedtest users’ subscribed Internet speeds since March 2013.

A deal between Comcast and Time Warner would create a new company controlling roughly 40% of households subscribing to high-speed broadband access in the US.

Since cable broadband companies don’t compete with each other for customers, consumers will have to look to other services from AT&T, Verizon (and in a few cities, Google) for high-speed broadband alternatives.

Using data from GeoResults, a telecom database and consulting firm, the Wall Street Journal mapped the current residential broadband footprints of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse -- all of which offer comparable broadband speeds across the country. Comcast stacks highest in the results with a total 50 million residential-household broadband footprint.