You might just start to detect a theme here.
Consumer Reports’ latest survey of the most popular ISPs in America is once again dominated by smaller providers and community-owned and operated broadband networks. Networks often built by locals that were tired of being ripped off by local monopolies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, or Charter.
According to the magazine’s semi-paywalled report, ISPs were ranked by 56,000 survey participants on a 100 point scale across four criteria: value for money, connection reliability, customer service, and speed.
The top ranked (95 points) ISP in the nation was Greenlight, a small fiber operator that deploys largely around upstate New York. The second (92) was EPB, the community-owned fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee. You might recall that Comcast tried to sue EPB out of existence. Giant monopolies also (successfully) passed a protectionist state law preventing the ISP from expanding to other markets.
The Least Liked Companies In America
Orgs like Consumer Reports and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) routinely find that broadband providers are the least liked companies by consumers across any industry in America; a stunning achievement when you remember that banks, airlines, and the insurance industry exists. At times I’ve even seen the IRS rank higher on these kinds of surveys than Comcast.
“We’ve observed consistent dissatisfaction among CR members in recent years when it comes to their telecommunication services, and internet service is no exception,” says Tian Wang, senior survey research associate at CR. “In fact, telecommunication services are some of the least popular of all the services that CR members help us to rate.”
They’re unpopular because regional monopolies have worked tirelessly for decades to not just dismantle all local competition, but to lobby state and federal lawmakers and regulators into a state of abject, corrupt fecklessness. The result is generally spotty coverage, high prices, slow speeds, and terrible customer service.
Consumer Reports noted that most Americans still only have the choice of one or two broadband providers:
But even this graph pants an overly rosy picture. Usually, only one of those options (most probably a cable provider) can provide modern generation speeds of 100 Mbps, albeit paired with slow upstream speeds. The rest are usually variations of a phone company that hasn’t upgraded its DSL lines in the last quarter century, wireless service that may suffer from reliability when congested, and expensive satellite broadband options.
When U.S. policymakers discuss what do do about this problem, taking direct aim at monopoly power usually never even enters the frame. In part because America is comically corrupt, but also because these major providers (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon) are directly tethered to both our domestic surveillance and first responder networks, making them too big — and too patriotic — to fail or hold accountable.
The Consumer Reports study makes it clear that consumers prefer fiber connections, and they generally prefer either community-owned or smaller broadband ISPs (which are actually incentivized to try and compete). Smaller, independent ISPs like Google Fiber (86), Allo (88), and Sonic (84 points) all scored well.
In contrast, the worst performing ISPs were either shitty, capped, and expensive satellite broadband (HughesNet (14) and Viasat (14)), or local regional cable monopolies that have no reason to even try, like Comcast Xfinity (28), CenturyLink’s Lumen (25), Mediacom’s Xtream (25), or Altice’s Optimum (20).
Again the problem is pretty clear. Decades of corruption have saddled Americans with terrible monopoly broadband providers. But again, if you were to listen to regulators (even Democratic telecom regulators, which are generally a bit better on telecom than Republican regulators) you’d be hard pressed to find a single one with the political courage to identify monopoly power and corruption as the core problem.
So instead policy and lawmakers babble rather incoherently about the utterly-ambiguous challenges in “bridging the digital divide,” and decide to throw billions in additional unaccountable subsidies at the problem in the hopes that this time — the end result will somehow differ.
