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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Small ISPs And Munis Top Consumer Reports Ranking While Altice, Comcast Fare Poorly
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Consumer Reports’ latest survey of the most popular ISPs in America is once again dominated by smaller providers and community-owned and operated broadband networks.
The magazine’s semi-paywalled report measured the opinions of 48,000 readers on a 100 point scale across four criteria: value for money, connection reliability, customer service, and speed.
The top ranked (95 points) ISP in the nation according to Consumer Reports was Greenlight, a small fiber operator that deploys largely around upstate New York. The second (92) was EPB, the community-owned fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee whose deployment has helped the city envision an estimated $2.69 billion return on its initial investment.
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At the same time, regional monopolies that benefit from muted competition and oversight continued to fare poorly in the magazine’s rankings.
Expensive and usage-capped satellite broadband services fared the worst (HughesNet (14) and Viasat (14)), followed by a peppering of regional cable and telco monopolies like Comcast Xfinity (28), CenturyLink/Lumen (25), Mediacom’s Xtream (25), or Altice’s Optimum (20).
The magazine noted that the telecom industry remains one of the least liked business sectors in all of American industry. It’s something confirmed by other organizations like the American Customer Satisfaction Index, whose data often shows the telecom sector with worse customer satisfaction ratings than airlines, insurance companies, banks, and even the IRS.
“We’ve observed consistent dissatisfaction among CR members in recent years when it comes to their telecommunication services, and Internet service is no exception,” said Tian Wang, senior survey research associate at Consumer Reports. “In fact, telecommunication services are some of the least popular of all the services that CR members help us to rate."
As always, a lack of competition was the primary cause for consumer anger. The survey found that roughly 1 in 5 Consumer Reports members said their current ISP was their only option (aka: a monopoly). Another 21 percent said they had only two companies to choose between (a duopoly). Contrary to flawed FCC data, very few had the option of multiple providers.
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The combination of limited competition and state and federal regulatory capture directly result in high broadband prices, slow speeds, spotty coverage, and substandard customer service.
Customer dissatisfaction was even worse for subscribers stuck under a broadband monopoly or duopoly and were locked into expensive multi-service bundles. Unsurprisingly, Consumer Reports also found that broadband subscribers were broadly more satisfied with fiber connections than their cable, DSL, wireless, or satellite counterparts.
Consumer Reports found that consumer broadband speeds have effectively doubled from 173 megabits per second (Mbps) in 2022, to 304 Mbps this year. At the same time the median price of broadband service in 2024 was $85 a month (not including sneaky broadband and cable fees), a $9 per month jump from two years earlier.
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