Business Choice 2023: The Top ISPs in North America

pcmag.com:

Office use is rebounding since pandemic restrictions lifted, and that means broadband ISPs must be ready. For businesses to stay competitive, their internet connections have to be faster and more reliable than ever. We haven't asked readers about the best ISPs for work in a couple of years, but for 2023, we're back, asking which provider employees prefer.

But we went beyond surveying just employees this year: As part of an ongoing partnership with our colleagues at Spiceworks(Opens in a new window) and its Aberdeen Strategy & Research(Opens in a new window) division (Spiceworks is owned by PCMag's parent company, Ziff Davis), our survey also targets IT managers, determining which vendors they would recommend without reservation when it comes to office broadband.

When it comes to how IT selects an internet provider, Aberdeen has found that the top three criteria are reliability, speed, and cost. Jim Rapoza, VP & Principal Analyst at Aberdeen, says, "Our research into IT has consistently shown the high cost of even short amounts of internet downtime, with an hour of downtime easily [costing] six and even seven figures for many businesses. So it makes sense that businesses would put reliability at the top of their selection criteria."

The results are below, and not just for the United States: We also ask several thousand workers and IT managers in Canada to rate their broadband for work.

It's not unusual to find a mainly consumer-oriented ISP being touted for work, when so many of us work from home and put those high-speed lines to the test with office VPNs and video-conference meetings. But we're in unfamiliar territory when a municipal-run ISP dominates this category. NextLight—the ISP found in one town in Colorado—just