Imagine this scenario: You’re on your way to a national park and you start to get curious if you’ll get a signal there. Will it be enough to make a call, or send that sweet picture to a loved one? Well, data for all 63 of the national parks in the U.S. is a tough ask, but thanks to a new report by Ookla, the top five is pretty easy to find.
According to said report, the top five fastest national parks in the U.S. are Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Grand Teton, Cuyahoga Valley, and Hot Springs national parks. At the top of the list, Sequoia had a median download speed of 163.3 Mbps while Hot Springs put up 117.33 Mbps.
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Upload speeds were mostly the same, with Mount Rainier, Grand Teton, and Sequoia making a second appearance, though the Hawaii Volcanoes and Big Bend national parks squeaked in as well. The winner here was Mount Rainier with 21.04 Mbps, with Big Bend coming in fifth with a 6.12 Mbps median upload speed.
On the other end of the spectrum, the five slowest national parks based on download speeds were Mammoth Cave, Yellowstone, Redwood, Kings Canyon, and Death Valley. Of those, Death Valley was the worst at a scant 7.56 Mbps. Those were also the slowest in terms of upload speeds, with Mammoth Cave at the end of the line with a 0.93 Mbps median upload speed.
The rest of the national parks fit somewhere between those two extremes. Ookla notes that national parks near metropolitan areas tended to have an advantage over ones that were out in the sticks. For reference, Sequoia National Park is only 85 miles away from Fresno, California, while Cuyahoga Valley is roughly 20 miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio.
Ookla noted that the answer to upload and download speed woes may be satellite internet from providers like Starlink. In the speedtest giant’s report, Starlink had the fastest upload speeds of any internet provider in most national parks while still competing in terms of download speeds.
Of the 10 most popular national parks in the country, Starlink had the top upload speed in eight of them and either the top or second fastest download speeds in six of them. So, if you’re headed to Joshua Tree state park for some astrophotography, for which the park is famous, you’ll be able to upload those pictures a little over three times faster with Starlink than with any traditional mobile service like T-Mobile or Verizon.
