Survey Says! Best ISP Is…   6/26/2005 - 1,374 views, 1 Comment

The 6,000 survey participants, all PC World subscribers, were asked to rate their ISPs on a scale of 1 to 7 (hey, Aunty didn’t design it, she just reports it), with 1 representing “extremely dissatisfied” and 7 representing “extremely satisfied”. Then they took all of the responses, per ISP, which were in the 6-7 range, and ranked the ISPs based on what percentage of users gave a given ISP a 6 or 7 for the particular category of ISP service. So, for example, if 85% of ISP X’s customers gave that ISP a 6 or 7 for a given category, it would rate higher than an ISP for whom only 79% of their customers gave them a 6 or 7 in the same category.

Categories ranked included overall service, reliability, tech support, customer support, download speeds, upload speeds, and spam blocking.

The surprising winner, overall, was Earthlink’s cable service. In fact, perhaps more surprising, the top three ISPs for overall service were all cable companies. Whether this is a reflection on the ISPs quality of service, or the customers’ quality of expectation, Aunty leaves as an exercise for the reader, but there you have it.

In the DSL category, almost astonishingly, Verizon was the clear front-runner. This is astonishing in no small part because of how ticked off Verizon’s customers have been with them over Verizon’s recent “block the entire non-US emailing world from our inbox” non-policy policy.

Perhaps of most interest to Aunty’s readers will be that nobody did particularly well in the “spam blocking” category, with only 55% of the top ISP’s customers saying that they were doing a job deserving of a 6 or a 7, and only three in total garnering 6s and 7s from more than 50% of their customers. Those ISPs were SBC Yahoo (55%), Earthlink (52%) and MSN (51%).

You can review the results of the survey at PC World. Where does your ISP fit in?