PC World's ISP Service Rankings, as of June 2005

Ant writes "Broadband Reports reports a PC World article on the best and worst Internet Service Providers (ISPs). More than 6,000 PC World readers rated major providers for its speed, technical support, and more. The article also reveals which broadband and dial-up services make the grade and which fall flat."

Comments

Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[CyricZ]

Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating instead. I think it'll be more accurate, because we don't have to worry about not saying negative things about our sponsors, unlike a magazine like PC World.

So state your ISP, and rank them out of 10, with 0 being the worst and 10 being the best. Explain why they're good, and any past experiences.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[Scott Swezey]

Cox Communications (Southern California): 5 (Horrible support, could-be-faster speeds, and lame port filters)

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[TheKidWho]

I hate you, I really really do

Anyways

9 RoadRunner. It's fast, they just doubled my download speed in the past year to 740KB/s! And it works without any problems.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[ptbarnett]

PC World doesn't even mention Speakeasy

I rate them a 9, only because I think the cost is a bit high. But, service is exceptional and reliable.

Why I like them:

• 6 megabit/sec downstream (effective rates peaks out at about 4.5 M/sec)
• 768K upstream (effective rate about 650K/sec)
• Techie-friendly TOS: I'm allowed to run servers: game, email, web, etc.
• Static IP (extra ones are inexpensive)
• Speakeasy will configure their DNS to return the FQDN of your choice when doing a reverse lookup on your IP.
• Unix shell account, if you want it.
• Share your connection with your neighbor, if you don't charge your neighbor anything.
• If you DO want to charge for sharing, Speakeasy will collect the amount that you specifiy from your neighbor, and credit part of it to your bill.

One thing I wish they would reconsider: they now offer VoIP service that uses their network. But, they will only assign a phone number from my area code. I'd switch from Vonage, if they would match Vonage's ability to assign me a number in my employer's city, rather than mine.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[ian rogers]

I'd say Charter isn't too good.

They messed up our cable, so in the winter, whenever the sun would go down, it would get cold and we would get no signal.

They finally cranked up the signal, but then in the early summer/late spring, the moment the sun would get up in the sky and it would get warm, the signal would cut out because it was too hot.

Also, every time we call in, they ask if we have a router. Of course we do, so we say we do. They tell us that it's the router's fault, before we even explain what's going on. This may be standard ISP practice, but it's still ridiculous.

If we need someone to come out for a service call, and call on a Monday, they'll tell us they'll have someone out here by Thursday. Only problem with that is, no one is home, with both parents working and both kids at school. They won't fix anything without talking to the people who called in, so they always show up when we're gone, and then tell us they'll come back again sometime, but don't tell us when.

I'd say they get around a 7. When it works, it works well, but when it doesn't work, it's a really ridiculous process to get it fixed.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[Polymorph2000]

speakeasy, 9.5. Doubled my speed 2 years ago, there's no waiting time when you call tech support, 8 free email accounts, webspace/ssh access on one of their servers. The also contact their customers immediately if they notice a pc on their network infected with spyware (of the port scanning and/or pinging variety), and provide step by step instructions to get rid of it.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[IANAAC]

You're not alone in rating Speakeasy high. I switched away from SBC to them early this year and have had nothing but positive experineces with them. Enough to switch my phone to their VoIP service too. So far it's been great.

Yeah, they're a bit more expensive, but truthfully, I have no problem paying a bit more for the superior tech support I've received from them.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[N3Roaster]

SBC -- 3

Lately they've been pretty reliable here, but about a year ago there were problems with "area outages" about once a week at work. Whenever somebody complained that the Internet was broken, I took a look at things, figured out that the problem wasn't on my end and said we just had to wait until SBC fixed things on their end. One day, somebody decided to call support. What could be the harm? Well, I warned him not to, but he wouldn't listen. He called and got someone calling himself Richard with a thick Indian accent who told my coworker to do a variety of things, some that I had already done and others that made absolutely no sense. About a half hour into this, he asked Richard if the problem could be on the SBC side of things. He said all his monitors showed green, whatever that means. After another two hours of trying things as stupid as pinging yahoo when there isn't an Internet connection (which of course didn't work, but he must've done it dozens of times), the call was escalated to the next tier of support. This person could be understood, she gave some basic instructions that had already been tried, but after a couple minutes said she had run some tests and thinks it's an SBC problem. The call was sent to maintenance which said immediately that it's an area outage and gave an estimate as to when the problem would be fixed and a number we could call to get back to maintenance. A couple hours later, the problem was indeed fixed, but Richard's instructions resulted in the network settings on the computer being completely screwed up (about 45 minutes wasted figuring out what had been changed and putting things right) and on top of that, Richard had changed the account password and not told us what the new one is so I had to call maintenance back and get the password reset.

More recently, they've started to block access to port 25 on servers not on a small whitelist that they won't add the mail server I use to. (I don't have access to it, so I can't just use another port. I understand the reasoning behind blocking port 25, but it's still evil.)

Reps were continually calling trying to upsell, sometimes to what I already had (yes, I already have that service. Shouldn't you know what I'm already buying from you before you call me?).

Two things are keeping the score above minimum. The price continues to go down (or rather, the speed keeps going up with no increase in price), but I'm keeping an eye on the bill just in case they try to jack up the rates without warning (or provide warning in tiny print) and lately the service has remained uninterrupted for quite some time.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[LearnToSpell]

Cablevision (Optimum Offline) in NY I'd give a 6, maybe. The speeds are pretty awesome for residential access. I routinely get about 1100K (big K) down.

That's the pro. Cons are obvious and widespread.

• CV caps - if you upload for over an hour straight, there's a decent chance they'll limit your rate to 150k (small k) up. That kills your download rate naturally. Even better, they won't even tell you about it, so if you're wondering all of a sudden why your speeds suck, you have to phone customer support, and then they get an "engineer" to phone you back 24 hours later, re-read the ToS, make sure you agree to them, and remove the cap. It's a total pain in the ass.
• Email sucks. It's common to get errors trying to send mail. Incoming mail bounces frequently. Mail's disappeared completely before. There's a stupid virus scanner that you can't turn off, so if you subscribe to groups like Bugtraq, expect to only be able to read about 75% of posts.
• Newsgroup access sucks worse than email, although it's not quite as bad as it was. It's limited to ~120K download, and for years, the retention was about 2 days. Timeouts are common.
• They block ports. 80's blocked, as is 25, for the obvious ones.

Stability's not bad. My IP address changes once a year, maybe. But that's just network connection. Actually trying to do anything with it (see email/NG) can result in problems.

Pricewise, it's $50/month if you don't have cable TV through them, and $45 otherwise. Used to be cheaper, but it's crept up over the last few years.

Customer service is generally clueless. I emailed them when I was having intermittent trouble accessing sites. Figured out a couple minutes later that one of their nameservers had died. TWO WEEKS LATER, I got a reply telling me to unplug the modem and reboot my computer, which of course would have done nothing.

As soon as FIOS comes into my area (should be this year sometime), I'm bailing. I hate Verizon, but not as much as Cablevision.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[FLEB]

I doubt it's as much a matter of a "Massive Shareholder" as the fact that it's just not worth it to support Linux for many consumer-level ISPs. Carve out the number of home Linux machines from the total market. From that, carve out the number of Linux users who AREN'T advanced enough to resolve their own issues. The handful of people you'd have left hardly justifies setting up a support infrastructure for Linux.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Aside from DNS servers yo-yoing up and down for weeks, a central office screwup that destroyed any packets over a few hundred bytes, a string of chronic service outages, some incoming email blocks that don't correspond to any known spam blacklist, and tech support which is clueless, incompetent, deaf, rude and outright dishonest, I've been happy with Verizon DSL.

All the network problems were last year, to be fair.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[jht]

I use them for home, and I'd use them at my office if I could get anything other than IDSL from them at my location (I have an office in a huge old industrial complex where only Verizon and ISPs with facilities in the building can offer DSL). I've sent several of my friends and customers to Speakeasy with high confidence, and though I also wish they'd charge a little less, it's nice to have a DSL ISP that's still in business. That's pretty rare.

(I should know, before Speakeasy I was a Flashcom customer and then a DirecTV DSL user)

I did have a lot of trouble with them in early 2003, when I first signed up after DirecTV DSL chomped. The first time was really Verizon's fault - they screwed up the line release. The second time, though, was in May '93 when Speakeasy started switching users away from Covad's backbone - I was down for nearly two weeks and nearly walked away then.

To their credit, service since then has been utterly impeccable. The longest unscheduled outage I've had has been about 5-10 minutes or so, and never during the day. Speeds to most locations is very good as well. The important thing to me at this point is that Speakeasy tries to take care of customers properly, and even if they goof once in a while the fact that they make an effort is way better than most of the giants will do.

Re:Let's do a Slashdot ISP rating.

[netwiz]

I bet you're using the 4.x.x.x DNS... avoid those like the plague. There's two old-school caching farms at 206.124.64.253 and 206.124.65.253 (from the GTE.net company) that are fast, fast, fast, and never down.

Make the "Grade?"

[Scott Swezey]

Last time I called my ISP for tech support, they left me on the line with some automated POS for 20 minutes. Then, after I followed all of its crap instructions, it made me wait for 20 more minutes while it was "waiting for my modem to respond." If the modem would connect to their network, do you think I would have been calling them?! As far as I am concerned, most everywhere with a "Tech support" department fails.

"Best of" chart seems limited

[knifeyspooney]

Only the biggest, corporate ISP's are considered. Where are the independent national ISP's that frequently outrank the big ones in other surveys, such as bway.net and Speakeasy?

Reporters report reporting on the report.

[CosmeticLobotamy]

Is this some sort of pyramid scheme? Does Microsoft donate to charity if I report that Slashdot reports that Broadband Reports reports a PC World article on the best and worst Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to someone else?

Re:Reporters report reporting on the report.

[mccalli]

Depends. Are you a reporter?

Cheers,
Ian

Customer service

[xstonedogx]

Don't forget excellent customer service.

I've never had anything but top-notch customer service from them. It's their number one selling point as far as I'm concerned.

New Lepers

[Moiche]

This just confirms what we already suspected: dial-up users are the new lepers in our wired heirarchical society, and they're dissatisfied about it. Moiche

For UK ISPs...

[Insipid Trunculance]

Go to ADSLguide.

Not Much Is New

[value_added]

Karl Bode, editor of the ISP ratings Web site BroadbandReports.com (formerly known as DSLreports.com), says that even with improvements in equipment and technology, broadband installation remains problematic. ...

Gail Cafferty has first-hand experience with the problem. ... "One week after Cox sent a technician to install our service, everything died," she says. "I was sure the installation wasn't the problem. I called the tech support line and had to deal with someone who didn't understand what I was talking about, and who made me walk through everything I'd already done before getting to the next level of support," Cafferty says.

Cafferty persisted until Cox agreed to send a technician to her home, who ultimately diagnosed and corrected the problem, which turned out to be Cox's fault. A month later, Cafferty noted an $80 service charge for the house call on her bill.

I don't think this qualifies as an "installation problem" but a typical example of how any and all problems are handled. Namely, tech support isn't tech support. It's clueless computer user support.

I use SBC (only local provider) and went through a few dozen or so "Support Tickets" over the course of the first year. With each call, the voice on the other end forced you through through an identical checklist -- running Windows, running their PPPoE client, directly connnected (no NAT, firewall, proxy, etc.), resetting the modem and rebooting at every stage, etc.. If you didn't lose your temper and get to a higher level support, you'd discover that those folks weren't any more knowledgable, but were at least willing to have somebody investigate the problem (as opposed to having someone investigate me).

One day after having a line problem corrected (their fault), the technician who showed up left me with *his* card with a home 24-hour contact number, explaining to me that it's entirely possible for anyone to call the same office ("Network Operations") and talk to the same people that the field techs deal with, instead of customer service drones. Yeah, so why wasn't I told a year before?

Since then, I've upgraded to a fixed IP service (for more money, of course), and all my intermittent problems seem to have disappeared. I still have the tech's card, of course.

In Canada

[Vrejakti]

In Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada... over the past 5 years I have tried all 3 broadband ISP's available.

Videon (now Shaw) is a cable ISP: Speeds of 600KB/sec (kilobytes) are common on their ~5mbit (megabit) connection for roughly $40 a month. Reliability remains poor. At best you'll have 90% uptime each month. At worst 2 weeks no internet 1 week with internet. (At which point I canceled my account and never looked back). Shaw offers a free static IP based on current MAC address, however they limit monthly transfers to 50GB, anything downloaded over 50GB you may be subject to fees. Their TOS is very anti sharing.

Skyweb is a Satellite internet ISP. Uptime is poor, speeds are marginal. I stuck with them roughly one month, due to a rain storm causing massive downtime.

Finally, MTS is a DSL based ISP. Their speeds are competitive. Price is fair, roughly $45 a month. Uptime is 100% every month, unless they are doing maintenance which will lower uptime to 99.9% reliability. Speeds currently are 3mbit down. They are friendly with server hosting, however IP's are dynamic.

Because reliability is the only thing that matters to me:

Shaw receives 0/10
Skyweb 1/10
MTS 10/10

Speakeasy

[courtarro]

It's unfortunate to see that Speakeasy, an ISP known for its flexible usage policies, is not specifically represented in that review. From the TOS: "Speakeasy believes in the right of the individual to publish information they feel is important to the world via the Internet." This includes allowing servers and sharing connections, as long one's activities don't disrupt others' use. As a DSL customer that is outside SE's range, I am curious how SE compares to the more restrictive services of the companies represented in the review.

Misleading results..

[papasui]

Disclaimer: I'm a network engineer for one of the major cable companies.

I think these types of surveys are really misleading, because the major players are all HUGE companies that typically have completely different management in each area. The major part of the problem is how these companies were formed, by buying out existing companies. Obviously someone needs to still run the business for that area so most/all the employees come with the purchase. What you end up with is a division that doesn't always fit in with the rest of the company and continue to run things the old way. Even if their performance is better than the rest of the purchasing company on average standardization is necessary to ensure quality.
Along these same lines I work in a division that is typically 1st or 2nd in the entire company on many measurements. Our customer satisfaction measurements are very high. But I could point to areas in the company that typically very low in general. The opinion of the company by the customer is drastically different in those areas.
So I guess what I'm getting at is take these results with a grain of salt. I work very very hard to make sure that every customer is taken care of and just because someone in Kentucky had a bad experience doesn't mean someone in Florida won't have a terrific one with the same company.

Worthless for the /. Reader

[eno2001]

This is a rating of the biggest ISPs and it's based on normal consumer needs, not geek needs. You'll notice that Speakeasy (the BEST DSL ISP out there) is not on the list. That's because most consumers don't need static IP. How many of you hear actually use dynamic IP? I don't. Even with dialup I only used ISPs that allowed me to have a static IP and run servers. That would probably speak for 90% of the Slashdot population.

Many of the ISPs listed in the report don't allow you to run servers either. What good is that? We've got services to provide dammit! I, for one, don't trust anyone with my e-mail but myself. I have 500 GB of space for mail with mail archived back to 1990 (from the old Cleveland Freenet days). Why on earth would I want an ISP that wouldn't let me run my own secure and reliable mail server? Same goes for DNS. When I had a static dialup account (Stratos Internet Services in Cleveland who got bought out and all customers fucked over by the shitty ISP Corecomm), I didn't run my own DNS. When Corecomm took over, I needed a DNS change made ASAP for mail. They screwed up the DNS change even though I was completely clear about what needed to be done. It also took a week for them to make the change. After that it took another week to fix the error THEY made. So I had two weeks without mail because I didn't run DNS. Never again. Now I do it all: mail, DNS, web, it's all on my systems and nothing on my ISPs systems. That way *if* I have to switch ISPs, I can carry all my data with me and just change DNS myself.

I'm sure most of you can relate and run all those services yourself for the same reason; most ISPs IT departments provide pretty poor service for the advanced user. I'm happy running everything myself. I've been doing it for seven years now and have only mysefl to blame if something stops working. Nothing better than that for incentive to keep your systems secure and up to date! This report from PC World does not address those kinds of needs because it's a consumer rag. Slashdot should do it's own survey.

Oh yeah this is OT: I *HATE* Corecom. They fucked me over in so many ways, I can't wait to tell people to NOT buy service from them. Stratos was a decent company that provided unlimited dialup for the reasonable price of $9.95. For static IP, it was $21.95. When Corecom took over, they did the following to me:

1. Stole my e-mail address that I'd had for five years at that point (used to be eno@stratos.net). They told me that when they merged the accounts from Corecom and Stratos that the user at Corecom who was eno@core.com already had the address eno@stratos.net. Talk about lazy admins!!! They fucked me over with mail and I've never forgiven them for that!
2. They took away my static IP. I was trying to hit my system from work one afternoon and wasn't getting any response. I assumed that maybe my dialup connection got futzed or something. When I got home, I found that I couldn't log in, so I called support. They told me that due to the merge I now had to use 'eno@stratos.net' as my login (even after they stole my e-mail address!). So I changed that and they reset my password. After a few tries, I was able to log in. But... lo and behold I had a different IP than the one I normally had! I called them back and asked where my static IP was. They said, "Oh. You have a standard account. You need to talk to sales to get static IP". !!!WTF???!!!! I said that I'd had a static IP for five years and they said that it's something to talk to sales about. So I did. And sales said, "You have a standard dialup account without static IP." I said, "But I'm paying $21.95 a month"! And they said, "Yeah, that's just standard unlimited dialup". Me, "What about the $9.95 rate!!!?" Them, "Huh? We've never offered that. Oh wait. You must be a Stratos customer. Yeah, those rates are gone". !!!????WTF????!!!! Them, "If you want static, you have to pay by the year and it's $360 a year. By the way, it looks like you owe us money for st

Re:SBC opt-out port 25 blocking

[benjamindees]

It's here, but, no, I wouldn't expect a person to just stumble upon it. I had to go through two levels of tech support people (yelling all the way) before one finally admitted they were blocking port 25 at all.

Re: Cox Communications

[orangesquid]

I still maintain that having a dynamic IP and port filters is like having a phone which can't receive most incoming calls and whose number changes every day. It's next to useless. Sure, people can leave messages for you elsewhere (via your ISP's email), but if you want to have your own answering machine (maybe your ISP blocks large attached files), you can't. Perhaps you don't need all of your ISP's services (webspace that doesn't have PHP, unreliable e-mail, whatever) and just want a network connection so you can manage your communication as you see fit---what good is a major broadband ISP then?

The server-client infrastructure relies on some VERY powerful servers that can handle tons of connections. If there are six billion humans online sometime down the road, they aren't all going to be able to be on AIM at the same time. Duh. The ARPANET was more of a redundant network with a handful of nodes (which were all servers with local access) on equal footing. We moved away from that. Now, we're moving into an age of P2P communications. ISPs need to realize that although a lot of people surf the web, the Internet is more than just a giant TV. It's not just about centralized content.

I'm on Speakeasy. It may be a bit more costly, but, if I add up the cost of cheap broadband and PHP webhosting with tons of disk space, I'm saving buttloads of money. Hell, they even give me whatever reverse-DNS entry I want for my IP address for free.

These Ratings have nothing to do with reality

[Prien715]

And everything to do with marketing. Anyone who's seen earthlink's recent commercials know they're promoting the wazoo out of spam blocking. How do you know how good spam blocking is? I'd assume everyone gets some. Why not sign up for a bunch of junkmail lists with each ISP and see which one clobbers the most?

This survey means very little to me other than if I was in marketing for one of these groups. Then I'd care.

Australian readers

[OneArmedMan]

Might do well to check this page

http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/results2004.htm

not sure if its the latest tho

Re:DSL isn't all that great...

[Alioth]

It's not the gamers that soak up your bandwidth, it's people using P2P software. Games still use relatively little bandwidth per user (especially compared to P2P).