Looking for ISP Satisfaction? Life Is Finer With Fiber
After 20 years of quizzing Americans about how they rate their internet providers(Opens in a new window), researchers at the American Customer Satisfaction Index(Opens in a new window) have come to one conclusion: There’s fiber optic broadband and then there’s every other kind.
So for this year’s survey of ISPs, ACSI split that category into fiber and non-fiber categories. The results posted Tuesday show how fiber’s advantages—not just fast download speeds but equally fast upload speeds coupled with enormous capacity—leave customers on those connections happier across a variety of companies.
As a group, fiber ISPs came away with an average score of 75 out of a possible 100. AT&T Fiber led the category with a score of 80, followed by CenturyLink Fiber (78), Google Fiber (76), and Verizon Fios (75). The least liked service here, Comcast’s nascent Xfinity Fiber, still had a 73 score.
The non-fiber group—mainly cable providers but also some fixed-wireless providers—had an average score of just 66. T-Mobile’s home wireless led this pack with a score of 73, with AT&T’s regular Internet (itself partially fiber-based) just behind at 72. Among cable providers, Cable One's Sparklight had the top cable score at 71, trailed by Comcast's Xfinity at 68 and Mediacom’s Xtream at 65. The worst score in this category: the dismal 58 earned by Altice USA’s Optimum.
ACSI respondents had better things to say about the speed and reliability of fiber than those of other services; fiber providers averaged scores of 80 in both benchmarks, while the non-fiber group averaged 72 in each of them.
Those ratings roughly match the assessments of PCMag readers in this year’s Readers’ Choice awards. Four of the top five providers were fiber services:
Read more on pcmag.com
