What's more important than a steady internet connection at work, be it a SOHO or an enterprise high-rise? For most businesses, nothing.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer higher-end services to business, with faster speeds to satisfy staffing needs. But only a few biz-oriented providers made the cut for this year's Business Choice ISPs.

Scores, provided by the readers of PCMag.com, cover your overall feelings of satisfaction, as well as satisfaction with things like connection reliability, the value of what your office pays, and the overall likelihood you'd ever recommend your ISP to a colleague (or even a competitor). None have excellent scores across all the categories; few people would say their ISP is perfect. But one big name provider in particular scores well enough to earn the Business Choice Award.

You can be part of Business Choice! Sign up for the Readers' Choice Survey mailing list to receive invitations in the future.

These ISPs are reliable and perhaps well liked, but which is the fastest? Read the Fastest ISPs of 2017 to find out.

Internet Service Providers for Work

Verizon Fios was one of the first winners of our PCMag Business Choice for ISPs in 2015. In 2016, its score dipped from an overall 8.4 (out of a range from 0 to 10), to an 8.0, where it's remained ever since, including 2018. Last year, Fios was overrun by the competition from RCN's Business division, but RCN didn't have enough responses to qualify this year, pushing Fios back into the top position.

That 8.0 might not sound like much, but look at the gap above and you'll see it's huge. With Fios at or more than a full point ahead of the other big name competition, it's clear Verizon is doing something very, very right when it comes to service and satisfaction.

Even the next best performer, Spectrum Business (formed Frankenstein-like from the parts that were once Time Warner Cable, Charter, and others) could only muster a 7.2 overall. There's no category where Spectrum or any other outperforms Fios in 2018.

The only category that comes close is in value for the service, where Fios earns its lowest rating of 7.5; Spectrum is at 6.8, followed closely by AT&T Fiber at 6.7. We'd venture to guess that the short spread is because everyone hates the cost of internet access, even from a company they otherwise like.

Fios's grandest score comes with an 8.6 for satisfaction with reliability, which indicates just how good the uptime is with its fiber-to-the-home/premises service. It's also a nice jump from the 8.3 it got last year for reliability.

The likelihood to recommend for Fios used to be one of its biggest strengths—this story is all word of mouth, and that's what put Fios on top—but those numbers are dipping. In 2015, it had an 8.2 (which lead to a Net Promoter Score of 38 percent); it dipped in 2016, went up again last year to 8.2, but now it's at an all-time low in this survey with 7.8.

That earns it a pretty weak NPS of 24 percent, but there's something to be said for it when only Verizon Fios and Spectrum Business got a positive number—the NPS for AT&T, Comcast, and Cox are all negative numbers—yes, below zero. That means customers are talking smack about those services, so Fios and Spectrum should be happy people are just neutral at best.

See all of our survey results for business ISPs.

WINNERS: Business Internet Service Providers

Verizon Fios
After a one-year absence from the winners circle, Fios is back in the top spot for business owners who know a good, reliable broadband service when they see it. Fios kills the competition in all categories where it has a measurement, especially for reliability. Workplaces can't go wrong with fiber from Fios.

Methodology

We email 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 23 through May 14, 2018.

Respondents were asked to rate their ISP using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' 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 internet service provider?"

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). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2018.)

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