Consumer Reports recently asked its members to rate their ISPs on four issues:

• The value received
• Reliability of the broadband connection
• Speed
• Technical Support

Consumers were asked to rate their ISP on a scale of 1 to 5 for each of the four issues. Consumer reports received 56,000 responses to the question. Each ISP was then given a rating, with a maximum of 100 points. To get a 100 score, ISPs would need a 5 rating for each of the four characteristics. Note that Consumer Reports doesn’t report these results to be statistically accurate – these are just the cumulative ratings from its many members.

Following are the ISPs that got the highest ratings from customers.

• Greenlight (95 points). This is a municipally owned fiber ISP in Wilson, North Carolina.
• EPB (92 points). This is the municipal fiber ISP in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
• Allo Fiber (88 points). This is the highest rated commercial ISP. Allo has headquarters in Nebraska but is expanding fiber to many new markets.
• Google Fiber (86 points). Google Fiber has quietly gotten rave reviews since its first fiber customers in 2012.
• GoNetSpeed (86 points). Formerly known as Otelco, this is a holding company that owns small telephone companies in Alabama, West Virginia, Missouri, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
• Sonic (84 points). Sonic is a commercial fiber overbuilder in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area.
• Shentel (79 points). The company started as an independent telephone company serving Shenandoah County, Virginia and now serves customers in six states.
• Hotwire Communications (78 points). The company started in Florida in 2002 selling cable TV and broadband to MDUs. It has grown to serve communities from coast to coast.
• T-Mobile (70 points). This is going to surprise a lot of ISPs, but customers are giving good ratings to T-Mobile’s FWA cellular broadband.
• Metronet (68 points). Metronet built its first fiber network in Illinois and has now expanded fiber to 300 markets across 17 states.

Following were consumers’ least favorite ten ISPs, from the highest to lowest ranking.

• Astound Broadband powered by Wave (28 points). The company was formed by the merger of RCN Communications, Wave Broadband, and Grande Communications.
• Xfinity (Comcast) (28 points). Comcast is the largest cable company in the world, with over 32 million broadband customers.
• Xtream (Mediacom) (25 points). This is a cable company started in 1995 that has grown through acquisitions.
• Lumen (CenturyLink) (25 points). This is a giant telephone company that was formerly Mountain Bell and was part of AT&T.
• Breezeline (Atlantic Broadband) (22 points). This is a cable company that owns systems in eleven states.
• Optimum (Altice) (20 points). Originally a cable company from Europe, Altice USA was formed through the purchase of Cablevision and Suddenlink in 2016.
• Bright Speed (19 points). Bright Speed is the newly formed telephone company that purchased mostly copper customers from 20 states from CenturyLink.
• Kinetic by Windstream (18 points). There are several telephone companies at the bottom, and it seems likely that reviews of DSL is pulling the ratings down. Windstream is an incumbent telephone company that has grown through numerous acquisitions over the years.
• HughesNet (14 points). It’s not surprising to see the high-orbit satellites at the bottom. They are expensive, and the connections have extremely high latency due to the satellites being parked over 20,000 miles from Earth.
• Viasat (14 points). The other high-orbit satellite company.