The Best and Worst ISPs

Sign-Up and Support

Signing up with a new ISP can be a hassle. Sure enough, we heard several horror stories. "It was a nightmare," says Joe Anderson of his experience switching to cable-access provider Media One (recently merged with AT&T). The setup trashed his Windows Registry, forcing him to reformat his hard drive, and left him without Web access for a month.

But Anderson's experience seems to have been an exception: Our respondents describe themselves as mostly happy with their ISPs' installation and setup. National and local ISP users give their provider an excellent rating, with scores of 78 and 77 percent, respectively. AOL, AT&T WorldNet, and EarthLink/MindSpring, scored even higher. (Too few regional ISP users responded to the installation question to provide meaningful results.)

The easiest way to get up and running with a new ISP--registering at a Web site--is available only to people already online. This process commonly involves downloading software that walks you through the registration and often includes a customized browser. Only two of our ISPs--Concentric and Qwest--don't offer this option. Alternatively, you should be able to phone in for a free CD that contains the necessary software. Every ISP we evaluated provides this option.

Suffering Support

The Web is amazing when everything works. But when something does go wrong--whether it be constantly dropped connections or shaky software--the experience can be amazingly awful. So it should come as no surprise that four out of five respondents to our survey admit they've had to ask for help at some time.

Support issues convinced Kay Cahill to switch ISPs recently. "I kept getting booted off [my old ISP] before I could even get started," she recalls. They told me to change this, change that, but nothing seemed to help." So she dropped the local provider and signed up with @Home instead. Later, after her husband inadvertently disconnected the cable modem, she called for help. Cahill says, "They had someone out to the house in about an hour. I was impressed."

You can't expect house calls like that from every ISP, but you should insist on solid service and support. Too bad so few of our ISPs came through. Only AT&T WorldNet and EarthLink/MindSpring earned Outstanding service and support satisfaction ratings in our poll. Of the rest, only GTE gained a Good mark, five received a rating of Fair, and a dismaying four sank to our lowest rating, Poor: Prodigy Internet and three regional ISPs--BellSouth, Pacific Bell, and Southwestern Bell. Local ISPs, meanwhile, collected a Good ranking overall.

On the surface, all 15 of our ISPs offer equal support policies--no charge, toll-free, and around-the-clock. But dig a bit deeper, and you'll find that some are worse than others. Bell Atlantic and Southwestern Bell garnered the highest percentage of complaints about support quality. Other ISPs provide exceptional service: Notably, EarthLink/MindSpring sported the lowest percentage of complaints of any ISP, just 6 percent.

Internet Service Provided?

In the ISP game, it's easy to stick with the status quo. But with more providers than ever, and with fast access and free services altering the landscape faster than you can say "TCP/IP," there is no sense in just settling for second best.

"I'm looking for where I can get the most bang for my buck," says Bill Smeltzer, a small-business counselor from Chillicothe, Ohio. "If I find that my ISP doesn't give me the service that it promised, then I'm gone."

Good advice, Bill.