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Americans Really Can't Stand Their Internet Service Providers

posted by janrinok on Friday June 17 2022, @09:35AM   

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] As broadband connectivity becomes more and more integral to daily work and schooling habits, few ISPs are meeting our expectations. If we start to see increased competition, that might change.

Your industry may have a perception problem when it gets lower customer satisfaction ratings than the US Postal Service or even gas stations. But that's where internet service providers are now, with the recent release of the American Customer Satisfaction Index's Telecommunications Study for 2021-2022. 

Among more than 45 different industries surveyed (including such wide-ranging trades as food manufacturing, life insurance, airlines, hotels, hospitals and social media), ISPs came in dead last for customer satisfaction, with a 64 rating on a zero to 100 scale. That's two points behind the next lowest industry (subscription TV services at 66) and a 1.5% loss over the previous year's performance.

Internet service providers bring up the rear in the latest ACSI list of customer satisfaction by industry.

[...] One other standout from the report is newcomer T-Mobile Home Internet, which hit the market in 2021 and debuted at second on the list with a score of 71. That bodes well for the fixed wireless option, which uses its 5G and 4G LTE networks to connect homes to the internet and aims to be a disruptor to traditional broadband providers (the tagline on its site is "Free yourself from internet BS"). If these scores are any indication, it and other newcomers might have a shot at success.

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Original Submission

• Re:It's their own fault (Score: 5, Informative) by Booga1 on Friday June 17 2022, @10:48AM

  by Booga1 (6333) on Friday June 17 2022, @10:48AM (#1253962)

  The nomenclature and advertising is the same for the US. It's been as describe for practically every ISP for the entire country. Everything Runaway has said is true and not exaggerated at all. I have personally experienced the upload problem where a large upload will choke every other connection to a crawl. You wanna see some other complaints about ISPs? https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/01/12/0321218 [soylentnews.org]

  Some typical complaints about US ISPs:

  • Rising prices for the same service levels.
  • Lowering data caps.
  • New data caps instituted because people started actually using the service more during the pandemic.
  • False accusations of copyright violations.
  • Billing people after service was canceled.
  • Charging people for "modem rental" when the people aren't even renting the modem.
  • Charging people for not returning the "rented modem" that never existed.
  • Charging people for an extra month of service when they cancel if they don't cancel before the next billing cycle.
  • Charging for a whole month of service even when they do cancel before the next cycle but the service cut off date goes a few days into the next cycle.
  • Charging various "regulatory service recovery fees" for 911 and other things they don't provide.
  • Injecting advertising into pages that aren't SSL/TLS secured.
  • Delivering advertising pages instead of NXDOMAIN for typos in URLs.

  That doesn't even get into the collusion they have going on to fake competition, stifle municipal broadband in areas they don't even serve, and collecting subsidies for areas they promise they'll maybe someday think about serving.
  Throw on top of that the net neutrality shenanigans where they're trying to make Netflix, Google, and other companies pay the ISP for the pleasure of not throttling the connections to the customer. Exempting their own services from the data caps and throttling, etc...

  I could go on, but I don't feel like making an exhaustive list of the crap they pull.

  Parent

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