Looking at cat videos at work requires a steady hand, a keen eye over the shoulder for the boss, and a worthwhile internet connection. If you've ever wished your office cubicle had much better broadband, this is the story you can take to your boss. Tell him just how well various business-oriented ISPs rate with the readers of PCMag.
PCMag's Business Choice: ISPs (internet service providers) highlight the broadband providers that score best overall with readers, as well as in categories like reliability, value, and how likely they are to be recommended to colleagues and friends. Your own ISP may not make the cut (we require a certain number of responses to include an ISP in any of the categories), but those that do are used by a clear majority of our readers. Yet only a few of those score so well that users are truly happy with the service. Read on to see which ISPs your boss should pick, so you can get those crystal-clear 4K cat video streams.
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These ISPs are reliable and perhaps well liked, but which is the fastest? Read the Fastest ISPs of 2017 to find out.
Internet Service Providers for Business
In our third year of rating ISPs for use at the workplace, RCN continues to impress. For the second year in a row, the business side of the cable-and-fiber-ISP in the northeastern United States has taken the top slot, this year adding a tenth of a point to its overall score, earning an 8.2 (on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 as the very best).
RCN Business isn't just great overall. PCMag readers rated it the best in every category of the survey except one (in reliability, in comes in second to Verizon Fios, but still with an 8.1 to Fios's 8.3). RCN shows particularly well in value with an 8.0, and the likelihood to be recommended to colleagues with an 8.2.
That last one translated into a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of just 40 percent, but that's a lot better than most others in the survey. Three out of the five ISPs that made the cut this year got negative NPS numbers (AT&T, Spectrum, and Comcast), meaning users actively dissaude others from trying the service.
Verizon Fios—which won the award the previous two years, sharing with RCN in 2016—didn't fair badly this year. In fact, its overall score didn't even dip, but it did drop in reliability to 8.3 from 8.5, and likelihood to recommend went to 7.7 from 8.0 last year. It's not a bad year for Fios, but not good enough for us to give it the nod as a Business Choice Award winner this year.
The response was lower this year for the survey so a couple ISPs didn't make the cut, like Cox and CenturyLink. At least two from last year—Charter and Time Warner—are now merged and offer service as Spectrum Business, but its 6.8 overall score is almost a perfect average from what the two got individually last year. In one ISP, there is a relatively significant increase in overall score: AT&T's fiber service for business went from a 6.7 last year to a 7.0 this year—earning it a slot in third place, right behind Verizon Fios. Probably the less said about readers' feelings toward Comcast Business the better, much like last year.
See all of our survey results for Business ISPs.
WINNERS: ISPs FOR BUSINESS
RCN Business
RCN's on a winning streak in Readers' Choice. This is the second year in a row the company's workplace ISP service has taken the top marks in almost every category, making it the year's standout.
Methodology
We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. The surveys are hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from April 24, 2017, through May 15, 2017.
Respondents were asked to rate their work ISP using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.
Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your work ISP?"
Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.
Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 bestseller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2016.)
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