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Top ISPs Report

April 2000 report

We're now monthly on Fusion! This is the latest report from Network World and Visual Networks as we look at the top dial-up ISPs in the market. Through statistical analysis of Visual's Internet BenchMark data for dial-up service (see How We Did It), we ranked the top ISPs in the business-to-business, national and regional ISPs, as they compare to other vendors within the same market. We've also included a chart of the top performers for the last six months, to show whether an ISPs ranking this month has spiked for one month or is consistently above average.

In April 2000, AT&T WorldNet continues to claim the top spot in the national retail market, performing above average in four out of the nine categories tested. In the regional retail market, Ameritech took the top spot, and Concentric edged out AT&T's GNS service for first place in the business-to-business market.

Check out our results below, and come back next month for an updated report. For a list of our previous reports, click here. The quarterly report returns to the pages of Network World in July.

April 2000 Top ISPs, by Category
ISP	Score	Strengths
National Retail
AT&T WorldNet	16	Low CFR% (24-hour, evening hour), initial modem connect speed, average time to login
CompuServe	12	Average download time
GTE.net	12	Average DNS lookup time
Prodigy	12	Average DNS lookup time
Regional Retail
Ameritech	15	Low CFR% (Evening hour, business hour), average time to login
USWest	13	Low Web fail/timeout percentage
BellSouth	12	Average download time
RCN	12	Initial modem connect speed
Business-to-Business
Concentric	14	Average Web throughput, average download time
AT&T (GNS)	13	Average time to login
UUNET (GridNet)	13	Average time to login
Splitrock	12	Low Web/fail timeout percentage

Month-to-month comparison

ISP Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb. March April

AT&T WorldNet 14 18 17 17 19 16

Ameritech 13 13 13 15 15 15

Concentric 13 13 12 13 16 14

AT&T (GNS) 14 13 14 13 12 13

USWest 10 11 13 12 12 13

UUNET (GridNet) 13 15 14 11 13 13

Industry Averages for March 2000

Category National retail Regional retail B2B Top ISP

24-hour CFR% 3.70% 3.50% 3.60% Ameritech

Evening-hour CFR% 5.70% 4.70% 5.30% Ameritech

Business-hour CFR% 3.70% 3.60% 4.00% Ameritech

Initial modem speed 48.1K bit/sec 47.4K bit/sec 48K bit/sec. UUNET (GridNet)

Avg. time to login 30.3 sec. 31.9 sec. 32.5 sec. MindSpring

Avg. DNS lookup 504.4 msec 504.5 msec 624.5 msec Ameritech

Avg. Web Tput (KB/s) 4.3 4.6 4.6 Concentric

Avg. download time 21.3 sec. 23.3 sec. 22.9 sec. AOL

Avg. total Web fail % 0.90% 0.60% 1% AOL

How we did it

The data for this report comes from Visual Networks. Through its Internet BenchMark data, Visual rates national, regional and business-to-business ISPs according to several factors, including call failure rate, modem connect speed and Web download performance.

We took the raw data from Visual and applied statistical analysis to rate the relative performance of each ISP. First, we derived the standard deviation of the numbers in each performance category. Standard deviation is a measure of how far the numbers in a series diverge from each other.

For each category in which an ISP performed better than one standard deviation from the industry mean, we awarded it one point. If the ISP did better than two standard deviations from the mean, we awarded it two points. Similarly, if an ISP did worse than the industry mean by more than one standard deviation, we took a point away from its score. If it did significantly worse, meaning two or more standard deviations, we took away two points. We started with a baseline of 12 points, so if an ISP scored 0 points it ended up with an adjusted score of 12. After scoring each category, we summed the results to produce a single number that indicates the reliability and performance of each ISP. A rating of 12 means an ISP was about even with its peers, or the industry average.

ISP report archive:

Top ISPs, 04/17/00
Top ISPs, 01/31/00

Related links

ISP research page

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