We all know how important the Internet connection we have at home is—without it, entertainment, at the very least, grinds to a shuddering halt. Now imagine when you don't have reliable, fast connections at the office.
The Internet is the life-blood of today's workplace. But what Internet service providers are the best to use, whether you're a sole proprietor in a small-office-home-office (SOHO) situation or a full-on small-to-medium business (SMB)?
For more than 25 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviews with our Readers' Choice Awards, in which you, the readers, rate the products and services you use most. The Business Choice Awards extend the Readers' Choice Awards by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment. In this round, we asked you, the readers of PCMag, to rate not just your home connections but also those you utilize at work.
Want to participate in future surveys with other PCMag readers? Click here and sign up for the Readers' Choice survey email list to receive invitations.
On the next few pages, we'll reveal which of the nation's big ISPs you find most reliable and the best value, and which ones you'd recommend to a colleague. The answers may surprise you.
Business-Use ISPs
Business-Use ISPs
Fast, reliable Internet can make or break a company. That's why our readers always seem to gravitate toward an always-on, fiber optic-based service to back their play and their business.
Verizon FiOS is a 10-time winner in our surveys about home ISPs; and it's also the top-rated ISP in our inaugural look at ISPs at work. It's a clear winner from the overall score alone, setting it ahead of the pack with an 8.3 on a scale from 0 (extremely dissatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied). It's also well ahead of the competition in reliability (8.6) and the likelihood to earn a recommendation to a colleague (8.2).
On a sad note, it's been five years since Verizion also proclaimed it won't expand the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) footprint anymore, so chances are if your office doesn't have a FiOS option now, it never will. (And if you live in Texas, Florida, or California, check with Frontier Communications—Verizon is selling its FiOS operations in those states.)
Luckily, there is another option. Cablevision, the eighth-largest cable provider in the country, operating in and around New York City, offers the Optimum Online Internet service. And that includes a business-oriented version with same-day service guarantees and 24/7/365 tech support. It has service tiers that go as high as 101 Mbps for downloads. It might not be the fastest ISP for business, but it has a separate division called Lightpath for even higher-end deployments, such as fiber optics performing as high as 100 Gbps. Clearly, customers love Cablevision's value; it's the one area where it scored higher than Verizon FiOS. That and its scores for overall (8.0), reliability (8.3), and likelihood to be recommended (7.9) earn it the Business Choice Award as well.
The rest of the pack do little to distinguish themselves. Charter (the fourth-biggest cable provider) and Cox (third) are pretty much tied, though Cox has much stronger numbers for tech support and likelihood to recommend.
In fifth place comes an interesting vendor: Verizon, which operates a few business-only oriented tiers, including Verizon Small Business and Verizon Enterprise. It's the sold "biz only" ISP that managed to get enough responses to enter our results. Despite being willing to sell FiOS services with business guarantees in addition to its other landline and wireless Internet services, its scores are only fair to middling. It's also the first of the ISPs to get a negative rating for Net Promoter Score, which is a measure of how well customers speak of a vendor. All the rest (Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and CenturyLink) have even worse NPS numbers, meaning there are a lot more detractors than promoters of their services.
Business Choice Winners: ISPs
Verizon FiOS
FiOS is about as beloved by PCMag readers as any service could possibly be, with a decade of high ratings. Now it adds superlative services for business to the accolades readers appreciate. Fiber optic services are definitely the way to go, and if you're lucky enough to have FiOS service near your office, snag it.
Cablevision (Optimum)
The New York tri-state area has appreciated Cablevision since its founding in 1973 on Long Island. Since then, its expansion into services like Internet and businesses have flourished, and again customers have responded, giving the Optimum Business/Lightpath packages high marks, especially for value for the money spent.
Methodology
Methodology
For this instance of the 2015 Business Choice series, we emailed survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. This survey was hosted by Equation Research, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from April 20, 2015 through May 10, 2015. Each person who completed the survey was entered into a drawing to win a $350 Amazon.com Gift Card.
Respondents were asked to rate their business ISP. They were asked multiple questions about their overall satisfaction as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.
Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the ISPs compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the ISP's rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your ISP?"
Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.
Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors).
If you would like to participate in PCMag's monthly surveys and to be eligible for our monthly sweepstakes promotion, please sign up today.
Thanks to Ben Gottesman for his contributions to this story.
Further Reading
- US Netflix Subscribers Watch 3.2 Hours and Use 9.6 GB of Data Per Day
- A Third of Remote Workers Say Weak Internet Has Hurt Their Productivity
- Public Trials of SpaceX Satellite Internet Service to Begin Within 6 Months
- Business Choice Awards 2020: Routers and Servers/Network Attached Storage
- More in Business Choice
- More in Networking
Networking Reviews
- Gryphon Guardian
- Trendnet AC2200 WiFi Mesh Router System (TEW-830MDR2K)
- D-Link EXO AC3000 Smart Mesh Tri-Band Router (DIR-3060)
- Linksys Velop AX MX10
- EnGenius Tri-Band Whole-Home Wi-Fi System (ESR580)