(Credit:PCMag/Getty Images)
The push to return to the office is real, but the impact has been slow so far—at least among PCMag readers. In our latest survey, 30.3% of respondents say they work from home full-time, while 56.4% say they do at least sometimes. Both figures are up just a couple of percentage points from last year.
Whether you're telecommuting from your couch, working from a desk in an office, or a combination of both, how you connect to the internet is essential to your productivity. Our latest survey polled IT decision-makers and employees alike, asking key questions about reliability, speed, value, customer service, and other important factors to rank ISPs for work in the US and Canada.
If you want to boost productivity, maybe it's time to consider a new ISP? Read on to see which providers earn top marks for business and remote work, and which ones fall short.
For the best ISPs overall, take a look at our 2026 Readers’ Choice ISP survey results.
The Top United States ISPs for Work in 2026
Home Office ISPs
This year, we have some repeat winners among the top-rated ISPs for working from home. Starting with NextLight, the municipal ISP in Longmont, Colo., which once again tops the work-from-home ISP chart thanks to its stellar fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services.
NextLight customers who use the ISP for work give it higher scores than those who use it for non-work purposes. It doesn’t have a single score below 9.7 out of 10 across the board, and in several categories—ease of use, tech support, customer service, and likelihood to recommend—it earns a near-perfect 9.9.
Despite being available only in a limited area—Longmont has a population of around 104,000—NextLight wins our Readers’ Choice as the overall best ISP for home offices. “I'm a film editor and work from home,” says one respondent to the survey. “I need high bandwidth to send and receive massive files for my job. NextLight is super-fast, reliable, and has great customer service. Their internet is one of the reasons we moved to Longmont.”
Due to NextLight’s geographic limitations, we're also awarding a Readers’ Choice to a larger-scale fiber provider. For the second year in a row, that win goes to GFiber. It remains just below NextLight on most measures, but not by much (the two tie for connection speed). Anyone working from home in one of the more than 40 GFiber cities in the US should definitely sign up.
“We've had GFiber for around 13 years,” says one user. “We've only had a handful of outages in that time. I've been working from home for over seven years and have had minimal issues. Very happy. GFiber does what it is supposed to do.”
Starlink is the top satellite option for virtual employees. (Other satellite companies don’t even make the list, probably due to their small customer bases.) Starlink subscribers are enthusiastic about the service, giving it scores above 9.2 for overall satisfaction, connection speed and reliability, ease of use, and likelihood to recommend.
“I live in a very rural area, and Starlink is life-changing,” says one reader. “Prior to Starlink, I had a 10Mbps fixed-wireless ISP—way too slow for the 21st century.”
Meanwhile, Astound Broadband is the return champion among cable-first ISPs—those brands with a deep history as cable internet providers. (Few, if any, deploy only coaxial cable these days, favoring a mix of cable and fiber.) Astound beats out the likes of Cox, Optimum, Spectrum, and Xfinity, all four of which are at the bottom of the overall ISP list. Astound is more than a point and a half ahead of Optimum, the next-best cable-first provider, in overall satisfaction.
“Astound has the best speed and customer service in the area,” reports one survey taker. “The price they offered me was more than half that of their nearest competitor, and I couldn't be happier. Makes working from home easier than ever.”
“We switched from Xfinity, and they were always having issues and buffering," says another reader. "I have had zero issues with Astound. I work from home, and my kids are cyber students, and Astound has been amazing."
Finally, T-Mobile 5G Home Internet is the big winner for fixed wireless over 5G connections. Like last year, it’s the only one of the big three mobile network operators with a 5G-based ISP service to make it to the home office list.
“T-Mobile Home Internet is great,” says one work-from-home respondent. "I usually have two televisions streaming, two computers on the internet, and two VOIP phones working at the same time with no problems. I got the service as what I thought would be a stopgap until fiber was available, but I found out that it was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than the fiber.”
Office ISPs
When it comes to ISPs for the workplace, the winner is obvious: Astound Broadband again steals the show, the only ISP for the office with an overall satisfaction score above 8.0 (as rated by workers). In fact, it scores above 8.0 in every subcategory.
Astound’s best scores are for ease of use (8.8) and tech support (8.6). The only other ISP that comes close is AT&T; it ties Astound for setup (8.5). In most other measures, AT&T is a half point or more behind.
“We've had a better experience with Astound than anyone else,” says one survey respondent. “So glad we switched. My company is able to do more than ever before.”
IT-Managed ISPs
The IT managers we surveyed gave us enough to go on for three major business ISPs this year, all big names. Comcast (parent company to Xfinity) is at the bottom, Astound in the middle, and AT&T is, for the second year in a row, on top. AT&T's satisfaction score has improved by half a point, hitting 8.7 this year.
“Extremely reliable, fast connections are what we get using AT&T,” says an IT manager in our survey. “We just don't have any complaints.”
Carl Lepper, senior director of technology, media, and telecom intelligence at JD Power, says that AT&T is the consumer insight firm's "perennial winner" for corporate internet. "In general," he adds, "AT&T leads the way in larger businesses.”
While AT&T is ahead of Astound in that all-important satisfaction rating—our primary criteria for picking a winner—it trails Astound on most of the other subcategories.
The Top Canadian ISPs for Work in 2026
Home Office ISPs
Most Canadians continue to use one of the country’s major telecom companies (Bell, Telus, or Rogers) for their home office internet. Bell and Telus tie for overall satisfaction, but Telus takes the Readers’ Choice award for major ISP for home office use, thanks to higher scores for value, reliability, and likelihood to recommend.
“Using Telus has been a great experience and game-changer,” says one happy customer. “On days I have to work from home, the internet service is always seamless and efficient.”
Meanwhile, Starlink outperforms every other home-office ISP across every measure except customer service. It’s not only the satellite-based ISP winner, but the overall ISP winner for home offices in Canada.
“I have used another provider, and the connection wasn't that great most of the time,” says a user who only lives 10 minutes outside a city. “Starlink has been great. No problems at all. Fast and reliable.”
And that customer service winner? It's Videotron, which also earns a Readers’ Choice award this year as the top cable-first and fiber ISP for home offices. “When I had the service installed, I selected a self-install, but a tech still came to the house to verify," says one pleased Videotron customer. "They ended up replacing the cable outlet connected to the modem to give a better connection, all without charging me.”
Office and IT-Managed ISPs
Telus was the top ISP pick for offices last year and earns the accolade again for 2026. Employees particularly appreciate Telus's speeds, but also rate the ISP highly for reliability and ease of use.
“Telus offers reliable service that I can count on in my everyday work and provides effective solutions to keep up with workplace demands and the ever-changing technological advancements to make my job a lot easier to do,” says one respondent who uses Telus at the office.
Last year, the big three all made our list of ISPs managed by IT staff, but only Bell and Rogers make the cut this time. Of the two, Rogers is the clear favorite, earning top scores in every measure (the two tie only for connection speed). It’s a nice result for Rogers, which came in at the bottom of the IT-managed chart last time. In fact, Rogers’s 2026 performance is better across the board. Bell’s overall satisfaction among IT staff, meanwhile, has dropped half a point.
“We switched over not all that long ago as we are rolling out AI,” says an IT manager using Rogers. “I wanted to ensure we had the best service provider and the best connection that we could. So I went right to the experts!”
Full Results
The PCMag Business Choice survey for US ISPs was fielded from Jan. 30 to April 19, 2026. The survey for Canadian ISPs was conducted via an Alchemer panel of users from March 9 to 20, 2026. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read our methodology.