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Fast and reliable internet service in the home is critical for life in the modern world. In the latest PCMag Readers' Choice survey, we asked you to rate your broadband service provider. As in past years, you rated the providers on your overall satisfaction with the service and on key factors such as speed, reliability, service, support, and value.
After crunching the numbers, we're seeing some new trends this year. One source of frustration for many consumers is the lack of options. About two in five of our respondents (42%) don’t feel they have a choice in broadband provider. This is higher than in 2023 (34%). However, while many consumers may not be able to choose who provides their wired broadband connection, more and more people are moving to wireless solutions such as 5G fixed wireless and satellite, according to Leichtman Research Group. While these technologies may not match the speed of a wired connection, they’re fast enough for most people’s needs and help challenge the cable and fiber broadband providers’ local monopolies, which can help prices. And they're certainly better than nothing, which is sadly an option for too many.
Read on to see how your broadband service provider measures up and whether you should consider an alternative. If you even have that option.
The Top ISPs in the United States 2024
There are various flavors of broadband available to consumers today: traditional cable which is still the most popular, perhaps by default; fiber-to-the-home, which tends to offer much faster upload speeds; fixed wireless, which uses 5G connectivity in most cases; and satellite, which, as its name implies, connects to orbiting hardware in the sky to send and receive data. Which one do readers like the most?
This year’s overall Readers’ Choice Award winner is GFiber, the service formerly known as Google Fiber. Google previously won Readers’ Choice Awards for its broadband service in 2020 and 2021 and the service consistently rates high.
GFiber is available in select areas of 19 states from California to North Carolina, with services from 1 to 8 gigabits per second (Gbps) down and up, depending on your region. The service receives the highest ratings in our survey for overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend, as well as satisfaction with connection reliability, speed, and value. It finishes behind only Starlink for satisfaction with ease of use.
(Note: Click the down, left, and right arrows in our interactive charts to view all of the elements of our survey results.)
Verizon Fios also wins a Readers’ Choice Award this year. Like GFiber, connection reliability is Fios's highest-rated attribute. It has the third-highest satisfaction ratings for speed and ease of use.
Cable remains the most-used form of broadband in the United States. Astound Broadband operates multiple different companies offering cable service including those that used to be branded as Grande, RCN, and Wave. Astound/RCN is our Readers’ Choice Award winner for cable broadband ISPs, earning the highest overall satisfaction rating for this connection type. Like T-Mobile, Astound/RCN is notable for its customer service, earning the highest rating for satisfaction with repairs and tying with T-Mobile Home Internet and Astound/Grande for the best ratings in technical support and customer service. Astound/RCN’s lowest-scoring area is reliability of connection, where it earns a fairly middle-of-the-road score among its competitors.
Starlink, a division of SpaceX, offers fast connections wirelessly via satellite, which is valuable for internet users who live in places where fast terrestrial broadband isn't available.
This is the third straight year that Starlink has won a Readers’ Choice award. The company's overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend ratings are the highest it has received to date (and just a hair below those of GFiber). Starlink also lands behind GFiber in reliability and speed of connection. While Starlink doesn’t advertise specific speed ratings, we recently tested the service and averaged 113 megabits per second (Mbps), fast enough for most broadband applications.
Not everything is not rosy for Starlink, though. It rates in the bottom half of ISPs for satisfaction with value and is among the lowest-rated for satisfaction with customer service and tech support.
T-Mobile's 5G Home Internet provides broadband via a gateway device that brings the Internet into a home wirelessly by connecting to the carrier's 5G network. The company’s overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend ratings jump more than half a point from 2023 on a scale from zero (extremely dissatisfied) to ten (extremely satisfied). While T-Mobile’s satisfaction with speed rating is middling, survey respondents indicate the company is taking good care of its customers, giving it the highest ratings for satisfaction with setup, technical support, and ease of use.
The Top ISPs in Canada 2024
In Canada, most of the cable companies and the wireless phone carriers are also ISPs, usually with the same branding. Most of them also have what are called flankers: subsidiaries that target a different audience. Again, these flankers typically offer both phone service and broadband ISP service. That's what you get with Fizz, a part of Quebecor, which is also the owner of the bigger (and expanding) Videotron. Both those names are at the top of this year's list of Readers' Choice ISPs for the country.
Fizz takes home the Readers' Choice award—its first, not only for being the top overall but also as a cable provider (primarily). It earns scores almost entirely in the 8 out of 10 range, which is impressive when you consider that no other vendor in the list scores above a 7.9 in any category we asked about. Fizz ranks particularly well for value, speed, and ease of use. The only area where it lags is connection reliability, where it falls behind Starlink in our rankings. (Videotron also does well when it comes to tech support and repairs, and ties with other providers TekSavvy and Virgin Plus for customer service. But its overall satisfaction numbers and likelihood to recommend keep it in second.) Fizz—which prides itself on being online only, with no physical store locations—recently saw some expansion itself, to Western Canada.
Handing out awards for the different technology types makes Starlink, the ever-growing satellite service, our second winner in Canada. Its global reach also makes it the only ISP that can win a Readers' Choice award for both Canada and the US. (Another US satellite ISP, Viasat, is available north of the border, but didn't get enough response in our survey to include, nor did any other satellite providers.)
Our final winner is no stranger to accolades, having previously won our Fastest and Best ISPs award, including last year's. Bell Canada now claims a Readers' Choice award as it scores as the highest-rated ISP in the list that is also a major ISP (it’s one of the big three in the country along with Rogers and Telus) and a fiber-to-the-home-specific provider.
Interesting notes in the results: Both TekSavvy and Virgin Plus, which were award winners last year, had drops in their scores this year. Our other award winner last year was Shaw, but that carrier has now been absorbed into Rogers—a major player that hovers toward the bottom of the list, as it did last year, with the same overall satisfaction. It's spared the bottom spot given lower scores for Xplore and Bell MTS.
Full Results
The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for ISPs in the USA was in the field from March 18 to April 22, 2024; the Canadian version was conducted via a panel from March 19 to March 26, 2024. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read our survey methodology.
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About Ben Gottesman
Contributing Editor
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