Internet competition in every Massachusetts county
14 counties, 1,945,048 residential locations, counted block by block from the FCC's own filing. The counties with the worst competition scores in Massachusetts are also among the worst served: not one of the 2 has fiber in every block, and gigabit availability across them starts at 43.9%. The one with the best competition score still has no fiber in 17.8% of it.
The finding: the competition score and the fiber gap are different problems here
Our national study ranks Massachusetts 51 of 52 for wired competition: 37.9% of residential locations sit in a census block where at most one wired company reports service. The county view is where you find out what that number is actually made of, and in this state the answer is not the one North Dakota gave.
2 Massachusetts counties score 99.5% or higher, holding 26,068 residential locations. 0 of those 2 have no locations at all in a block without fiber, and gigabit availability across them runs 43.9% to 76.3%.
The last column of the table below names the operator reaching the widest share of each. Across that group they are: Xfinity. In North Dakota that column was rural cooperatives that had built fiber to everybody in their own territory, which is why the monopoly score there measures territory rather than deprivation. It does not read that way here: not one of the 2 is without a fiber gap, and gigabit availability across them starts at 43.9%. In Massachusetts the worst competition scores and the worst service are landing on the same counties, which is the opposite of the North Dakota reading rather than a variation on it.
So the competition figure here is measuring both, and the counties it is worth acting on are the ones low on the fiber column rather than high on the monopoly column. A block with one company is a monopoly by any definition, and a resident there has no alternative and no competitive pressure on price. Both things are true at once, and a number that cannot tell them apart should say so rather than be quietly averaged into a national ranking.
It inverts in the cities, which is the other half of the point. Suffolk County has the best competition figure in the state at 7.6%, and 17.8% of its locations are in a block where nobody reports fiber at all. Middlesex County, the largest by locations, is 7.6% and 11.3%.
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Every Massachusetts county
Sorted by the share of residential locations in a block with at most one wired company, worst first. The first three columns are computed here from the block level filing. Gigabit is the FCC's own county figure, which is the finest grain they publish speed at.
| County | Residential locations | At most one wired company | No fiber in the block | Gigabit available | Widest reaching wired operator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dukes County | 15,832 | 100.0% | 96.1% | 43.9% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Nantucket County | 10,236 | 100.0% | 100.0% | 76.3% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Franklin County | 28,652 | 95.8% | 74.2% | 70.2% | Xfinity (68%) |
| Barnstable County | 144,559 | 92.5% | 92.5% | 62.0% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Berkshire County | 55,651 | 77.0% | 54.7% | 29.3% | Spectrum (89%) |
| Hampden County | 139,855 | 59.4% | 61.6% | 82.5% | Xfinity (73%) |
| Bristol County | 170,518 | 57.6% | 58.9% | 61.2% | Xfinity (96%) |
| Hampshire County | 49,535 | 56.1% | 51.6% | 70.4% | Xfinity (67%) |
| Worcester County | 249,521 | 55.1% | 48.6% | 32.2% | Spectrum (66%) |
| Essex County | 209,344 | 30.3% | 36.7% | 68.7% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Plymouth County | 177,362 | 21.3% | 20.8% | 50.4% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Norfolk County | 192,481 | 10.7% | 13.6% | 65.4% | Xfinity (100%) |
| Middlesex County | 397,515 | 7.6% | 11.3% | 88.1% | Xfinity (98%) |
| Suffolk County | 103,987 | 7.6% | 17.8% | 77.4% | Xfinity (100%) |
The column adds up. These 14 rows sum to 1,945,048 residential locations, and to 37.9% and 38.5%, which are the figures we publish for Massachusetts on the national study. The county rows and the state row are computed from the same blocks with the same definitions, so they cannot disagree. The build refuses to ship this page if they ever do.
Method, and what these numbers cannot tell you
Source: the FCC Broadband Data Collection, filing period D25, published July 21, 2026, reflecting service as of . Competition figures are computed across every census block in Massachusetts: a location counts toward the first figure when at most one company reports wireline service, meaning fiber, cable or copper, in its block. Fixed wireless and satellite are excluded from that count and stated separately elsewhere on this site.
It is a floor, not an estimate. Coverage is self reported by providers and is known to overstate, so every overstatement moves a location out of the at-most-one group and never into it. The real figure is this one or worse.
Reporting service in a block is not the same as being able to connect a given house. A company that reaches one address on a street counts for the whole block, which is why the fiber gap column can look better than any resident's experience.
The last column is reach, not market share. It names the wired operator reporting service across the largest share of the county's locations, with that share in brackets. It says nothing about how many people buy from them.
License
This page and its table are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Republish it, adapt it, use it commercially, in a newspaper or on a government page, provided you credit WhereFiber and link to this page. The underlying counts are facts from a public federal dataset and nobody can own them; the license covers this write-up and the arrangement of this table.
How to cite this
Horvath, F. (2026). Internet competition in every Massachusetts county: wireline provider counts by census block. WhereFiber. Retrieved from https://wherefiber.com/research/massachusetts-counties/
Want this for another state, or a cut we have not published? Write to contact@wherefiber.com and we will run it.
Related
- The national block level competition study, all 52 states and territories ranked
- Who can actually get gigabit internet in America, where Massachusetts ranks near the top
- Every provider reporting service in Massachusetts