Most ISPs Rate Very Poorly in Temkin Consumer Study

Not surprising, but at&t is ranked higher then charter?! And DHL is ranked higher then at&t? LOL

My health plan sucks so much, it's not even on the list!

Am I the only one who has no issue with Charter's services, they are years ahead of their direct competition in most markets. I'll agree their TV service isn't as good as Dish Network, but it could be much worse. I will also say their DVR is quite expensive and a TV Tuner would be a wise investment.

I'm really starting to think these surveys forget Frontier Communications is still in business, they still receive my vote for worst company I've dealt with, and sadly after the Verizon territory purchase I deal with them quite often. AT&T uVerse and their outsourced business sales/support is probably tied with Frontier as worst on my list.

I also liked how Kia and Hyundai were rated so low...it's actually surprising considering they are growing faster than any other brands.

It's not the actual service that this is refering to I bet, it's the customer service, which definately sucks balls. Charter direct is great, but that's a forum on this website..

From my experience their customer service is right in line with the rest of the useless companies. Let's be honest here, all large companies have scripted CSR, and rarely can they fix the issue from their end (you get lucky occasionally).

Of the cable companies I've dealt with in the past few years, Midcontinent has been the easiest to deal with and Comcast was probably the most difficult. What makes Comcast's support even worse is that it's local, you can't just hang up and hope you get someone better, I've gotten the same useless guy 4 times in a two day period.

Take these surveys as a grain of salt. In a different survey, they could come out on time.

As long as false scarcity is the push, this will never change.

Of course that doesn't mean it easy to get service from some. I have an easy time with the Electricity provider(Green Mountain Energy), easy time with my credit union(Randolph-Brooks Credit union), no problems with Grocery store(H-E-B) but I do have a tough time with AT&T. You need to let them know everything that's going wrong with service when talking to tech support. I think of billing to be alot better but takes a long time to get a person. Automated phone systems are far too tough.

these cable companies were very begrudgingly LATE in actually getting around to deploying docsis 3.0 and the higher speeds that was supposed to bring to the MAINSTREAM consumer, but what we've seen are higher prices for less bandwidth, caps, and poor service with the lower speeds (below 50 megabits) often throttled and oversold shared nodes which are somewhat less bandwidth delivered than consumers pay for each and every month. there's no reason why consumers would rate their ISP's high on a consumer satisfaction survey and 3 years after completion of the major portions of the docsis 3 upgrades, the price is still above $1 per megabit downstream and upstream speeds have not kept pace with services such as FIOS which has 2 mainstream SYMMETRIC tiers. (25/25 and 35/35-- this higher speed is granfathered or revised to reflect 50/20 it would be 50/50 but for a lack of competition from Cablevision Time Warner, or Comcast).

...is it really all that surprising?

     If a customer is highly displeased, where can he go?  When there's only one other competitor, the competitor doesn't even have to be significantly better.  In fact, traditionally DSL is the slower/cheap way while cable is the faster/more expensive way, so I don't even know if it's really apples-apples competition.

     I say defacto since technically, there are "alternatives" (note the use of quotes), just none that are reasonable.  Of course, a commonly used argument is the numerous alternatives, and why additional regulation isn't needed.

Here are a few of these "alternatives:"

     Satellite?  That's "broadband" in name only.

     3G/4G/LTE/WiMax?  Not a very good option, because of crippling caps.  This is even if you are in an area covered by one of these.

     Dial-up?  It's a way to connect to the Internet...barely.

     T1?  Rather pricey and slower than DSL/Cable, but at least you would get a very, very good SLA.

     T3/OC3/OC192/etc.?  This doesn't count because if you are like most people, you can't afford to maintain a fleet of Bentley automobiles, and you probably don't have the financial means to live in a palace, manor, or castle.

     All this said, I do use Charter and my experiences have been fairly good.  It's also hard to deny they have made significant strides in the past few years.  However, I must note I use Charter Business (which does provides better customer service), and the quality of an ISP can definitely vary by area.  This isn't to say there isn't room for improvement; there always is.

But Verizon's customer service sucks both wireless and residential service. Must call them several times to get billing resolved. And of course the billing errors are ALWAYS in their favor. HMMMMMMM......

I am still going through hell trying to get FIOS billing fixed. I had a wonderful guy help me and I thanked him 1,000 times before we got off the phone.

I need to write a review for them but I am too lazy right now.