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Readers' Choice Awards 2020: Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

With many of us now relying on our home internet connections to get work done, PCMag asked readers to rate their ISPs. You won't be surprised by what they appreciate most, but which one offers the best residential broadband?

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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The biggest test of residential internet service is happening right now as people shelter in place and work from home to slow the spread of COVID-19. And the service providers, despite some hiccups, seemed to have pulled through.

The schedule for PCMag surveys coincidentally put internet service providers (ISPs) in the spotlight smack-dab in the middle of this digital pandemic response. What we found in our results was both consistent with the past and telling about the future.

Let's jump right to the two big winners this year. Both are services from big-name companies that support super-fast fiber to the home and happen to be curtailing any efforts to expand (and in some cases are getting much smaller). Yet their offerings are so beloved by their users that you'd be a fool to have any other ISP if one of them is available in your neighborhood.


READERS' CHOICE WINNER

"Local" ISP: Google Fiber
Consider that local in quotes as semi-ironic, since Google Fiber has service in multiple cities—yet it's hardly a national provider. That said, what Google Fiber offers is absolutely the very best an ISP can do, according to PCMag readers. They praise the service for everything from setup to cost to customer service, but especially for speed and ease of use.


READERS' CHOICE WINNER

National ISP: Verizon Fios
A decade and a half is a long time to consistently impress people, especially in the technology world. As of 2020, Verizon's Fios fiber-to-the-home service has done so 15 times in our annual surveys. Sometimes it shares the award, sometimes it steals it all for itself, but it's the only consistently high-rated internet service with a huge footprint.  


Google Fiber took the big win this year, its first time appearing in our Readers' Choice results. That's in part because it has a limited user base in just a few cites. It's limited enough that it hasn't always met the minimum threshold we need for responses to be included (go too low and we don't feel it's statistically valid to include an ISP—which is why your own amazing local ISP most likely didn't make the cut).

But take a glance at those numbers. Google Fiber only fell below 9.0 (out of 10) on two measures, and then it was only to a still-stunning 8.8 for cost and tech support each. Google Fiber's overall satisfaction score of 9.1 is literally the highest overall satisfaction score we've seen in the last 15 years of surveying people about ISPs. The only other company to come close was Verizon Fios itself, when it got an 8.9 in 2012. Google Fiber's across-the-board 9.0+ scores are stunning enough. That it earned a whopping 9.4 for likelihood to be recommended? That's almost as perfect as a recommendation gets.

We learned a long time ago to never discount Verizon Fios. Not only is it the long-time winner of this survey, it's also a perennial winner in our Fastest ISPstesting each year—it most recently won as Best Gaming ISP for 2020.  

This wasn't the best year Verizon Fios has had in our survey; its 8.2 overall satisfaction score is its second lowest ever. But that's up from the 8.1 it had in 2017 and 2018 and consistent with last year. Fios was also up when it comes to fees/cost (from 5.9 to 6.7, its worst score this year), tech support (7.1 to 7.5), and likelihood to be recommended by friends (8.0 to 8.1). Most of Fios's other scores were the same or a little lower.

Are there other ISPs of note this year? We had an interesting showing by RCN (a cable provider found mostly in the northeast, plus Chicago), Grande Communications (out of Texas), and Wave Broadband (on the West Coast)—all of which are owned/operated by the same parent, TPG Capital. Users of those three ISPs flooded our survey, so much so that we got more responses from RCN users than we did Comcast (which is the largest ISP in the nation with service in 40 states). That deluge wasn't enough for a win this time—Grande did win last year and RCN the three years before that—but  RCN and Grande both got a respectable 8.1 overall score, and Wave didn't do bad at 8.0. 

Below them was WOW! Internet, which topped our survey in 2013, in sixth place. Interestingly, after that spot, (almost) every ISP couldn't get enough respect in recommendations to even get a decent Net Promoter Score. The NPS (a score between -100 up to +100) is used by many companies to see how well customers speak about them. Below WOW!, the NPS scores are mostly negative numbers, indicating many more detractors than promoters.

In comparison, Google Fiber's NPS of 86 is so astronomically high it now has a guaranteed spot in our year-end Best Brands collection. Last year's winner (Grande) earned a Best Brand with a measly 55, so that alone signifies the difference.

The bottom-of-the-heap ISPs in our results, as always, tend to be slow. It would be satellite if we had enough response for those, I'm sure. Instead, it is the services that are mainly based on digital subscriber line (DSL) connections—the "broadband" that these days feels like dial-up speed, and happens to use the same copper wiring as those old dial-up modems. Even the two mobile wireless providers that made the cut this time (AT&T and Verizon Wireless) scored higher than the DSL providers, at 6.4 and 6.3 overall, respectively.

Note that having fiber to the home isn't a guarantee of great scores: Frontier bought up a healthy chunk of Verizon Fios property on the West Coast but could still only manage a 6.7 overall satisfaction rating from its customers. AT&T's own fiber was only a few tenths ahead of that at 7.1 (but at least managed a positive NPS, even if that number is a 4 out of 100).

It's worth noting that Verizon Fios had one of the largest number of survey respondents who subscribe to TV and internet service, at 72 percent. Only Optimum Online had more, at 73 percent. Even Comcast's Xfinity only had 69 percent of PCMag readers taking the TV option. For the full triple-play option—which includes internet, TV, and a home phone—Fios leads at 60 percent. Don't confuse usewith satisfaction however; we asked people to rate how they feel about the cost of those services, and Fios was only at a 7.2 for internet alone, and lower the more people added services.

It should also be noted that our two winners are not much of a monopoly. We asked people if their ISP was the only choice they had at home for broadband internet. For Verizon Fios it was only true for 6 percent of the users; Google Fiber was at 3 percent. (The ISPs most likely to be the only choice local monopolies: Suddenlink at 47 percent, followed by Optimum Online, Mediacom, and Cox all tied at 32 percent.) The more choice customers had, the higher the satisfaction rate overall with the ISP they picked.

Below is the full table of results for Readers' Choice 2020: Home ISPs.

Readers Choice 2020 ISPs full table

The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for ISPs was in the field from April 20, 2020, through March 11, 2020. For more information on how the survey is conducted, read the survey methodology.

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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