Eric Griffith

When you own a website or online business and rely on it being available to customers 24/7, even the shortest amount of downtime can be bad for business. That's extra true for Big Tech companies with huge amounts of customers. For them, just a single minute without internet service can mean millions of dollars lost. Amazon’s massive revenue would make it the biggest loser in an outage scenario no matter how long it might last. That’s the price of massive success, as the only place to go is (typically) down.

Rather than focusing exclusively on speed, we've expanded our ranking methodology and data sources to include a broader range of qualitative measurements, including the internet service providers' (ISPs) coverage area, prices, and customer satisfaction ratings. By combining all these data points, we're able to objectively pinpoint the Best ISPs in the US—not just the fastest ones. And we've broken down the winners into three separate categories: the Best Major ISPs, the Best All-Around ISPs, and the Best ISPs by Region of the US.

Every few years, BroadbandNow dives into the cost of internet plans across 2,000 US-based internet service providers (ISP) and how they compare to the median incomes of households across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. BroadbandNow is again checking who in America has broadband—defined as a connection with a minimum of 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads—and how many can get it for less than $50 per month. The answer is still: not everyone.

Annually, PC Magazine collects the data from a year’s worth of tests and crunch the numbers to see which internet service providers (ISPs) provide the throughput required to be called the fastest. With that data we can also see which cities, states, and countries have the fastest internet. Welcome to PC Magazine's national and regional results for 2022. The winners for 2022: Sonic and Verizon Fios. Sonic is no stranger to our winner's circle, having been here in 2019.

What is the perfect home-internet plan? A new survey from HighSpeedInternet.com figured it out based on the opinions of 1,002 US adults who have made at least one internet-plan switch in the past three years. Most customers covet a fiber-to-the-home connection running a minimum of 650 megabits per second, costing about $50 a month, preferable a little less. Why is that the sweet spot? Because the plans most people have now are far too expensive. The pandemic, of course, played a part.

Every year, BroadbandNow delves into the world of municipal broadband with a report on which states have made it illegal for towns and cities and counties to set up their own ISPs, or make it really difficult.  The report for 2020, written by telecom analyst Kendra Chamberlain, has a silver lining, though.

Internet service providers (ISPs) in the US are getting faster on average all the time. Most ISPs show gains in our PCMag Speed Index score year to year.

There are only a couple of notable exceptions. If we narrow things down to the "major" ISPs—those with the biggest footprint nationally, and the biggest customer base, we see a major change in our Fastest ISP coverage that dates back to when we started the series in 2010. This is the first time that Verizon FiOS isn't a clear winner. FiOS certainly is a winner—but FiOS's PCMag Speed Index is in an almost perfect tie with Comcast's Xfinity service. Comcast has been pushing speeds ever faster in the face of growing competition and regulation that prevented its merger with TWC. That has translated into great things for customers, obviously. The differences between the two services are stark, of course: FiOS fiber has symmetrical speeds (in fact, its national upload speed average is higher than its download speed!); Xfinity's cable-based service is all about download speed, reaching a 59.4Mbps number; it's the 10.6Mbps upload that drags down its index. It all leads to a mathematical tie that's almost too close to call.