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Guess what, D.C.? You’re paying a lot of money to connect to the Internet.

Internet costs in D.C. are higher than any other city in the country, a report from The WhiteFence Index reveals. According to the report, D.C. residents are paying an average of more than $60 dollars a month to connect to the Internet. That’s nearly $20 more than the national monthly average.

So why does it cost so much?

Well, there’s a simple answer and a not-so-simple answer. One explanation is that D.C. has the fastest broadband speeds in the country. The most recent “State of the Internet” report from Akamai—a cloud services provider—shows that D.C. has the fastest broadband speed out of any state in the U.S., with an average speed of 11.4 Mbps in the second quarter of 2013.

Getting Internet speeds like that certainly isn’t cheap. But Patrick Lucey, a policy program associate at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, thinks the answer isn’t so simple. “It could be a reflection of people in D.C. subscribing to faster service so they’re paying more,” he says, “but it’s also clearly a reflection of the different places that people have different services available.”

Right now, Comcast is the dominant Internet and cable service provider in D.C., and it has been for years. But while Comcast is available everywhere in the city, competing service providers RCN and Verizon FIOS are only available in certain parts of the city. Before the Cable Act of 1992, cable companies could sign exclusive franchise agreements with entire towns or areas to provide blanket service, essentially monopolizing their business in different areas. Because of that, Comcast has much more physical infrastructure than RCN or FIOS to connect residents in D.C. with service.

Up until 2007, service providers were allowed to sign exclusive deals with entire apartment buildings or complexes to create micro-monopolies. “The FCC has since banned those, but their legacy still leaves challenges for competitive choice,” Lucey says. “Even though they can’t physically exclude other companies from buildings anymore, it doesn’t necessarily change the wiring on the ground for most buildings.”

In order for companies like RCN and FIOS to be more widely available, they’d have to build out their own physical infrastructure to individual residents, which, of course, isn’t cheap. “They’d have to build out their own pipes to your house instead of being able to jump a competitor’s network or if there was municipal, publicly owned infrastructure everyone could use to,” Lucey says.

However, the idea of creating municipal broadband networks—publicly owned broadband infrastructure—is an idea that still needs a lot of work. D.C. has its own municipal broadband network, DC-CAN, which partnered up with the city’s existing fiber network, DC-NET, to bring high-speed Internet to low-income housing areas. Lucey says that DC-NET “mostly serves large institutions and offices” and not so much individual residents, apart from some low-income housing areas. “There have been some discussions about what DC-Net’s role in D.C. should be,” says Lucey.

But people in D.C. aren’t just paying some of the highest Internet costs in the country, they may be paying some of the highest costs in the world. According to the latest Cost of Connectivity Report conducted by the New America Foundation, Americans are paying more for broadband access than most other countries.

When it comes down to it, “the issue is that it is still a challenge for a competitive provider to construct their network into existing buildings if they were excluded at the time of its construction,” Lucey says, but “cities can help this by mandating certain construction codes that would facilitate competitors entry into buildings.”