Looking for ISP Satisfaction? Life Is Finer With Fiber

After 20 years of quizzing Americans about how they rate their internet providers(Opens in a new window), researchers at the American Customer Satisfaction Index(Opens in a new window) have come to one conclusion: There’s fiber optic broadband and then there’s every other kind.

So for this year’s survey of ISPs, ACSI split that category into fiber and non-fiber categories. The results posted Tuesday show how fiber’s advantages—not just fast download speeds but equally fast upload speeds coupled with enormous capacity—leave customers on those connections happier across a variety of companies.

As a group, fiber ISPs came away with an average score of 75 out of a possible 100. AT&T Fiber led the category with a score of 80, followed by CenturyLink Fiber (78), Google Fiber (76), and Verizon Fios (75). The least liked service here, Comcast’s nascent Xfinity Fiber, still had a 73 score. 

The non-fiber group—mainly cable providers but also some fixed-wireless providers—had an average score of just 66. T-Mobile’s home wireless led this pack with a score of 73, with AT&T’s regular Internet (itself partially fiber-based) just behind at 72. Among cable providers, Cable One’s Sparklight had the top cable score at 71, trailed by Comcast’s Xfinity at 68 and Mediacom’s Xtream at 65. The worst score in this category: the dismal 58 earned by Altice USA’s Optimum.

ACSI respondents had better things to say about the speed and reliability of fiber than those of other services; fiber providers averaged scores of 80 in both benchmarks, while the non-fiber group averaged 72 in each of them. 

Those ratings roughly match the assessments of PCMag readers in this year’s Readers’ Choice awards. Four of the top five providers were fiber services: the Longmont, Colo., municipally-owned fiber service NextLight (with a score of 9.9 out of 10), Google Fiber (9.0), and AT&T Fiber and Verizon Fios (tied at 8.2 with the one non-fiber provider among the top five, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband). 

The usual problem with fiber has been it not being available where you live or want to live—an issue that has left many people facing a cable monopoly in their neighborhood—but things have been getting better on that front. AT&T, which had earlier shown signs of skittishness about the expense of building out fiber, has been expanding its fiber footprint and increasing speeds. Google Fiber has come out of its own buildout pause to resume construction. And Verizon has combined expansions of its Fios fiber service’s footprint with price cuts for people who also sign up for wireless service. 

And while the $65 billion in broadband-buildout subsidies provided in 2021’s infrastructure law didn’t mandate a particular technology, the feds have signaled they will take a fiber-first approach in spending that to support expanding broadband availability.

The ACSI, which regularly polls customers about their assessments of industries ranging from social media to tablets and e-readers, also released benchmarks for subscription-TV services Tuesday that were much more positive than one might guess from the millions of cord cutters who have dumped pay-TV in the last year. 

That service sector as a whole came away with an average score of 69, with the top-ranked service being one that’s no longer sold to new customers: U-Verse TV(Opens in a new window), formerly an AT&T service that is now maintained by its former subsidiary DirecTV. Verizon Fios TV came in second with a score of 74, followed by Frontier Communications’ pay-TV service (also now closed to new subscribers since Frontier’s recent switch to selling Google’s YouTube TV(Opens in a new window)) ranked third with a score of 72. 

Both the broadband and pay-TV results came from interviews of 22,061 randomly selected customers done over email between April of 2011 and March of this year.