Imagine this scenario: You’re on your way to a national park, and you’re starting to wonder if you’ll get a signal there. Will it be enough to call or send that sweet picture to a loved one? Well, data for all 63 national parks in the US is a tough ask, but thanks to a new report from Ookla, the top five are pretty easy to come by.
According to the aforementioned report, the top five fastest national parks in the US are Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Grand Teton, Cuyahoga Valley, and Hot Springs National Parks. At the top of the list, Sequoia had an average download speed of 163.3 Mbps, while Hot Springs came in at 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 Hawaii’s Volcanoes and Big Bend National Parks also dropped in. The winner here was Mount Rainier at 21.04 Mbps, and Big Bend came in fifth with an average upload speed of 6.12 Mbps.
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 these, Death Valley was the worst at a meager 7.56 Mbps. They were also the slowest in terms of upload speeds, with Mammoth Cave at the bottom of the line with an average upload speed of 0.93 Mbps.
The rest of the national parks fit somewhere between those two extremes. Ookla says that national parks near big cities had an advantage over the outlying ones. For reference, Sequoia National Park is just 85 miles from Fresno, California, while Cuyahoga Valley is about 20 miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio.
Ookla noted that the answer to the upload and download speed woes could be satellite internet from providers like Starlink. Speedtest Giant’s report found that Starlink had the fastest upload speeds of any internet provider in most national parks, while also competing with download speeds.
Of the top 10 national parks in the country, Starlink had the top upload speed in eight of them, and either the top or second-fastest download speed in six of them. So if you’re heading to Joshua Tree State Park for some astrophotography, which the park is famous for, you’ll be able to upload those images a little over three times faster with StarLink than with any traditional cellular service like T-Mobile or Verizon.
