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Top ISPs Report

Is your ISP measuring up? Find out with our Top ISP Report, a joint venture between Network World and eTesting Labs' Internet BenchMark service. The data will be updated monthly.

August 2001 report

The charts below outline the top dial-up ISPs in the market for August 2001 and how they performed in nine metrics, as determined by eTesting Labs' Internet BenchMark data. We analyzed 22 ISPs (click here for the list); if your ISP isn't listed among the top performers, go ask them why they're not performing as well as their competitors.



TOP ISPs for August 2001
ISP Analysis
National Retail
AT&T WorldNet Another win for AT&T WorldNet. That makes 20 months of domination at the top spot in this market.
Regional Retail
Ameritech Pulls away a bit from 2nd place BellSouth. Strong performance in certain categories.
Business-to-Business
AT&T (GNS) Two in a row for AT&T (GNS), with McLeod USA close behind.



Category
24-hour CFR% Reflects how often a modem call to the provider gets through successfully over a 24-hour period. A failure would include a busy signal, ring no answer, modem problem or login failure. The lower the call failure rate percentage, the better.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
2.73% 1.98% 2.05%
Top ISPs*
AT&T Ameritech AT&T (GNS)
EarthLink BellSouth Genuity
JunoWeb Verizon-East McLeod USA
MSN   WorldCom
Prodigy    
Verizon-West    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Evening-hour CFR% How often a modem call to the provider gets through successfully during the evening hours. A failure would include a busy signal, ring no answer, modem problem or login failure. The lower the call failure rate percentage, the better.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
3.07% 2.53% 2.00%
Top ISPs*
AT&T Ameritech Genuity
EarthLink BellSouth McLeod USA
JunoWeb PacBell WorldCom
MSN RCN  
Prodigy SBIS  
Verizon-West Verizon-East  
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Business-hour CFR% How often a modem call to the provider gets through successfully during weekday business hours. A failure would include a busy signal, ring no answer, modem problem or login failure. The lower the call failure rate percentage, the better.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
3.41% 2.07% 3.05%
Top ISPs*
AT&T Ameritech AT&T (GNS)
JunoWeb BellSouth Genuity
MSN RCN McLeod USA
Prodigy Verizon-East WorldCom
Verizon-West    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Initial modem speed (in K bit/sec) Measurement of the negotiated connection speed to your ISP once the call has successfully gone through.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
48.05 47.83 47.76
Top ISPs*
AOL Ameritech AT&T (GNS)
AT&T BellSouth NaviPath
Broadwing Qwest WorldCom
CompuServe RCN XO
EarthLink    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Avg. time to login (in seconds) Reflects the time taken to connect and authenticate to a provider's network access server once the modem takes the line off-hook.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
29.62 31.6 29.94
Top ISPs*
AT&T Ameritech AT&T (GNS)
EarthLink PacBell Genuity
JunoWeb RCN NaviPath
MSN SBIS WorldCom
Verizon-West    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Avg. DNS lookup (in milliseconds) The time from sending the first DNS query until a successful response is received from any query. This reflects actual end user perception of the DNS resolution time, including retries.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
490.59 519.11 574.73
Top ISPs*
AOL Ameritech AT&T (GNS)
AT&T Qwest Genuity
Broadwing RCN McLeod USA
MSN SBIS NaviPath
Prodigy Verizon-East  
Verizon-West    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Avg. Web throughput (in K byte/sec) The effective transfer rate of the connection. The average of these Web throughput measurements is presented in the reports. Throughput does not necessarily reflect the actual bandwidth of the connection, but rather the effective Web throughput experienced using a connection.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
4.84 4.95 5.11
AT&T BellSouth AT&T (GNS)
Broadwing (tie) PacBell McLeod USA
EarthLink Qwest  
JunoWeb SBIS  
MSN    
Prodigy    
Verizon-West    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification; two bolded ISPs indicates a tie

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Category
Avg. download time (in seconds) The time taken for the complete Web page to download, including all page content. Calculated by measuring the time from the first HTTP TCP packet being sent to the server until the last HTTP TCP connection has terminated.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
24.9 27.03 26.07
Top ISPs*
AOL BellSouth AT&T (GNS)
AT&T PacBell McLeod USA
Broadwing Qwest NaviPath
CompuServe   XO
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification

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Category
Web fail/timeout% Any error message that appears as a dialog box for the Internet Explorer browser is considered a Web page failure. Any download that takes longer than 4 minutes to complete is cancelled and considered a Web page timeout. A low % is considered better.
National
average
Regional
average
B2B
average
0.62% 0.61% 0.48%
Top ISPs*
AT&T (tie) Ameritech AT&T (GNS)
Broadwing (tie) BellSouth McLeod USA
JunoWeb (tie) PacBell WorldCom
Prodigy (tie) SBIS  
EarthLink Verizon-East  
MSN    
* Those ISPs that performed above the average in the category noted; bolded ISPs are the top performer for this metric within their respective classification; two bolded ISPs indicates a tie

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How we did it

Our data comes from eTesting Labs and its Internet BenchMark division. Network World takes the data and applies statistical analysis to rate the relative performance of each ISP compared to the other ISPs within the same market classification (national, regional or business-to-business). Based on that analysis, we rank the top ISPs for the month listed. The chart above lists the top three ISPs that perform above the average for the metric listed within that classification.

A list of all the ISPs tested, as well as an archive of previous reports, appears below.

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ISP report archive:

Top ISPs, 07/01/02
Top ISPs, 06/10/02
Top ISPs, 04/01/02
Top ISPs, 03/04/02
Top ISPs, 02/04/02
Top ISPs, 12/31/01
Top ISPs, 12/10/01
Top ISPs, 11/05/01
Top ISPs, 10/01/01
Top ISPs, 09/03/01
Top ISPs, 07/30/01
Top ISPs, 07/02/01
Top ISPs, 05/28/01
Top ISPs, 04/30/01
Top ISPs, 04/02/01
Top ISPs, 03/05/01
Top ISPs, 01/29/01
Top ISPs, 12/25/00
Top ISPs, 12/04/00
Top ISPs, 10/23/00
Top ISPs, 09/25/00
Top ISPs, 08/28/00
Top ISPs, 07/24/00
Top ISPs, 06/26/00
Top ISPs, 05/29/00
Top ISPs, 04/17/00
Top ISPs, 01/31/00

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Who we tested

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