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Top ISPs - December 2003 Report

How is your ISP peforming?

Is your ISP measuring up? Find out. Our Top ISP Report is a joint venture between Network World and VeriTest's Internet BenchMark service. The data in this report is for December 2003 -- each month you can check back here for the latest data.

The dial-up ISP data is provided through Veritest and includes nine important categories for dial-up ISP users. the ISPs that have performed above the group average -- if your ISP isn't listed here, you need to ask why it's not performing as well as the top ISPs. What factors should you look at when choosing a dial-up ISP? Click here to find out.

In this report:

Dial-up providers
How we did it
Top ISP archive

December 2003's Top Dial-up ISPs, by category:

24-hour CFR%
Evening-hour CFR%
Business-hour CFR%
Initial modem speed (in K bit/sec)
Avg. time to login (in seconds)
Avg. DNS lookup (in milliseconds)
Avg. Web throughput (in K byte/sec)
Avg. download time (in seconds)
Web fail/timeout%

Who we tested

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.
Monthly average: 0.90%

1. BellSouth

2. AT&T

3. Level 3

4. Verizon

5. Juno

6. SBC Yahoo!

7. MCI

8. AT&T (BIS)

Dial-up categories | Back to top

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.
Monthly average: 0.90%

1. BellSouth

2. AT&T

3. Level 3

4. Verizon

5. Juno

6. MCI

7. AOL

8. AT&T (BIS)

9. EarthLink

10. MSN

11. SBC Yahoo!

Dial-up categories | Back to top

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.
Monthly average: 1.10%

1. BellSouth

2. Level 3

3. Verizon

4. SBC Yahoo!

5. AT&T

6. Juno

7. MCI

8. AT&T (BIS)

9. MSN

Dial-up categories | Back to top

Initial modem speed (in K bit/sec):
Measurement of the negotiated connection speed to your ISP once the call has successfully gone through.
Monthly average: 49.36

1. AT&T (BIS)

2. AT&T

3. BellSouth

Dial-up categories | Back to top

Average time to login:
Reflects the time taken to connect and authenticate to a provider's network access server once the modem takes the line off-hook.
Monthly average: 28.68

1. BellSouth

2. AT&T (BIS)

3. AT&T

Dial-up categories | Back to top

Average DNS lookup:
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, inluding retries.
Monthly average: 333.44

1. Level 3

2. AOL

3. XO

4. SBC Yahoo!

5. AT&T (BIS)

6. Verizon

7. Juno

8. AT&T

Dial-up categories | Back to top

Average Web throughput (in K bit/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 experiences using a connection.
Monthly average: 5.19

1. AT&T

2. AT&T (BIS)

3. EarthLink

4. BellSouth

5. Level 3

6. Verizon

Dial-up categories | Back to top

Average download time (in sec.):
The time taken for the complete Web page to download, including all page content. Calculated by measuring the time from the HTTP TCP packet being sent to the server until the last HTTP TCP connection has terminated.
Monthly average: 39.34

1. AOL

2. AT&T

3. AT&T (BIS)

4. BellSouth

Dial-up categories | Back to top

Average total 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.
Monthly average: 0.50%

1. BellSouth

2. AT&T

3. MCI

4. AT&T (BIS)

5. Juno

6. MSN

7. Verizon

Dial-up categories | Back to top

How we did it

Dial-up data
VeriTest and its Internet BenchMark division provide the dial-up data. Network World applies statistical analysis to the data. Based on the averages for the market,we list the top performers in each metric tested. We present all nine metrics provided by VeriTest on this page.

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