Top ISPs Report

May 2000 report

Here's 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 May 2000, AT&T's WorldNet service continues to top the national retail market, performing above average in six out of the nine categories tested. Ameritech remains the top regional retail ISP, and UUNET's GridNet service took the top spot 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.

May 2000 Top ISPs, by Category
ISP	Score	Strengths
National Retail
AT&T WorldNet	18	Low CFR% (24-hour, evening), Initial modem connect speed, average time to login, average DNS lookup time, Low web/fail timeout %
MindSpring	13	Initial modem connect speed, average time to login
Regional Retail
Ameritech	14	Low CFR% (24-hour, evening), average time to login
Business-to-Business
UUNET (GridNet)	16	Initial modem connect speed, average time to login, average download time
Concentric	15	Average DNS lookup time, average Web throughput, average download time, low Web/fail timeout %

Month-to-month comparison
ISP	Dec.	Jan.	Feb.	March	April	May
AT&T WorldNet	18	17	17	19	16	18
UUNET (GridNet)	15	14	11	13	13	16
Concentric	13	12	13	16	14	15
Ameritech	13	13	15	15	15	14
MindSpring	14	13	12	12	9	13

Industry Averages for May 2000
Category	National retail	Regional retail	B2B	Top ISP
24-hour CFR%	3.30%	2.30%	4.30%	Ameritech
Evening-hour CFR%	4.50%	2.10%	5.50%	Ameritech
Business-hour CFR%	4.10%	3.10%	5.10%	Ameritech/ BellSouth
Initial modem speed (KBps)	46.95	46.96	47.25	UUNET (GridNet)
Avg. time to login (sec)	30.39	32.14	31.71	MindSpring
Avg. DNS lookup (msec)	488.18	568.5	659.14	AT&T WorldNet
Avg. Web Tput (KB/s)	4.33	4.65	4.64	Concentric/ PacBell
Avg. download time (sec)	22.01	23.17	23.43	AOL
Avg. total Web fail %	0.60%	0.50%	0.50%	Ameritech

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.

Who we tested

ISP report archive:

Top ISPs, 05/29/00
Top ISPs, 04/17/00
Top ISPs, 01/31/00

Related links

ISP research page

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