A data cap is the number a provider doesn't put on the price tag: a monthly ceiling on how much you can download and upload before the bill climbs or the speed drops. Cable providers built a decade-long reputation around exactly that mechanic, while fiber providers built their marketing on the opposite promise — and …

An Xfinity customer in Boulder who signs up for 300 Mbps service today pays $40 a month. A neighbor two doors down who signed up for the identical plan two years ago is now paying $75 a month for the same speed — not because Comcast raised prices across the board, but because the first customer is still inside a …

Louisville, Colorado sits just east of the Boulder foothills in Boulder County, and its internet options look different from Boulder proper — a mix of established cable infrastructure, an actively expanding fiber footprint, legacy DSL in older pockets, and 5G fixed wireless filling gaps the wired networks haven't …

A single speed test result means almost nothing on its own. A number like "212 Mbps" only becomes useful once you know what conditions produced it, what your plan actually promises, and what that number does to a Zoom call or a cloud backup running in the background. Most Boulder residents who run a speed test are …

The technology running under your neighborhood street determines more about your internet's reliability than the plan name on your monthly bill. Xfinity (Comcast's residential brand) and CenturyLink both reach significant portions of Boulder, but they do so over fundamentally different physical infrastructure — DOCSIS …

If you're shopping for home internet in Boulder, the first decision isn't really which company to call — it's which technology to buy. Boulder addresses are commonly sold three very different things under the same "internet" label: DSL over old copper phone lines, cable over the coax that once carried television, and …

If you're on CenturyLink DSL in Boulder, you're on a technology its own parent company has stopped investing in. Lumen — CenturyLink's parent — has shifted its capital toward fiber under the Quantum Fiber brand and is no longer expanding the copper DSL network. DSL isn't being shut off tomorrow, but it's a legacy …

Boulder has lived through every era of residential internet. Residents who were online in the mid-1990s remember the screech of a 56k modem and the frustration of a busy phone line. A decade later, Comcast cable had taken over most of the city. Today, Boulder has Xfinity gigabit cable, two competing fiber networks, …