A year after a major customer-satisfaction survey found that a gap had opened up between people’s views of fiber-optic broadband and other categories of connectivity, the same survey now sees a similar split emerging between fixed-wireless broadband and cable internet. The 2024 edition of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Telecommunications Study, released Tuesday, follows last year’s report by looking at internet providers in two categories: fiber, with an average score of 76 out of 100, and not-fiber, with an average of 68.AT&T Fiber leads the first list with a score of 80; Verizon’s Fios comes in second at 77, followed by Lumen’s CenturyLink, Frontier, and Google Fiber with a three-way tie at 76.But the top two occupants of the “not-fiber” list earn scores that are up there with the fiber average, and neither sell cable broadband: T-Mobile’s 5G Home Internet lands a score of 76 followed by Verizon’s 5G Home with 74. AT&T Internet—the generically named hybrid fiber-copper service AT&T once sold as U-Verse—comes in third with a score of 69. The four biggest cable internet services in the US follow: Cox, 68; Charter Communications’ Spectrum, 68; Comcast’s Xfinity, 67; and Altice USA’s Optimum, 63.Fiber’s advantages have long been evident to subscribers lucky enough to get that connectivity at home: fast download speeds matched by equally fast upload speeds. Cable broadband, meanwhile, has been much more widely available on infrastructure built decades ago to carry cable TV to people’s homes, but it’s suffered from slow uploads and the decisions of many cable operators to enforce data caps even though their networks don’t exhibit capacity constraints.Fixed wireless—the fastest-growing category of broadband in the US last year—offers both extensive geographic reach as well as download and upload speeds competitive with cable. And firms such as T-Mobile and Verizon have won millions of consumers with no-cap service sold with simpler pricing than that of many cable operators. Last year, AT&T joined them by rolling out its own Internet Air service, which did not show up in the ACSI results. Many of the services that rank highly in the ACSI report also show up in PCMag’s latest Readers’ Choice awards for ISPs. Google Fiber led that list with a score of 9.3 out of 10, followed by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband (not mentioned in the ACSI study) at 9.0; Fios, 8.5; T-Home Home Internet, 8.4; and AT&T Fiber 8.2. The ACSI report also covers satisfaction with traditional pay TV as well as video-streaming services.
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Years of cord-cutting may have had the perverse effect of stabilizing scores in the former category, where pay-TV operators averaged a score of 70. As the report notes, after the ranks of pay-TV subscribers plunged from 105 million in 2010 to about 65 million, “remaining subscribers tend to skew older and are still generally satisfied with their service.”Verizon’s Fios TV ranked first with a score of 75, followed by Frontier, Cox, and Xfinity with scores of 71, 69, and 69. But streaming-video services left their customers happier overall, with an average of 79 across the board despite yet another round of rate hikes. The tightly bunched leaderboard had Amazon Prime Video first at 82, then Peacock and YouTube Premium tied for second at 80, then Apple TV+, Hulu, Netflix and Sling TV tied for third at 79.ACSI interviewed 25,468 randomly chosen customers over email between April 2023 and March 2024 to produce this report. It’s one of a series of assessments that the research firm regulatory conducts to discern customer contentment in such industry sectors as computers and social media.
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