If there's one thing that any ISP registrant knows, then it's that good services and support can be a hard thing to find in even the best of ISPs. After conducting several surveys and asking ISP users the country over, we came up with what we believe to be the definitive ways to a successful ISP. This is almost certainly one aimed more at the ISPs rather than the customers, however it should make a good reference for customers that believe their ISP could be better; now you can see how.

The Ten Ways

ISPreview believes that an ISP should be able to satisfy every one of the following ways in order to be the best. In fact when an ISP finally does achieve the goal of all ten then they could easily be the first to rate 100% =):

1) We'd like to see ISPs that have a detailed and regularly update service status page.

2) We'd like to see ISPs that have better communication through their customers about possible future changes, this could be done through member mailing lists, web page surveys and all sorts. ISPs should ALWAYS consult customers before implementing a new system; we should never be the last to know.

3) We'd like to see ISPs that offer more ways to communicate with customers, methods such as fax and voice mail are all too commonly over looked among the essentials of E-Mail and phone.

4) We'd like to see ISPs that upgrade their network BEFORE advertising for new customers, some simply don't seem to care if current ones are getting what they paid for or not. The policy of 'wait until it overloads and then upgrade' is no acceptable.

5) We'd like to see ISPs that are quicker to react to changes in the market, customers don't want to be forced into switching around ISPs just because one fails to act on a change (like unmetered) until it's too late.

6) We'd like to see ISPs put taps on adding new customers if it is likely to further decrease the service available to their current subscribers.

7) We'd like to see ISPs that give you more control over even deeper parts of your account via the web. The ability to change the Caller Line ID you have set-up for your freecall number (Laptop users), your master accounts login/password and or your payment details etc.

8) We'd like to see ISPs that respond to support E-Mails within 12hours and phone within 1 or 2 minutes. There should never be an engage tone and all E-Mails should be responded to as if they were a message from the phone - quickly!

9) We'd like to see ISPs that give excellent download AND multiplayer speeds for all areas of the Internet and not just one. Some offer good downloads but poor multiplayer pings and vica versa.

10) We'd like to see ISPs with better web page designs that contain details even the newest of Internet users could use and then more advanced ones for experts. Web pages should always be detailed, well laid out and concise to what they offer, customers need to be able to know EVERYTHING possible about the product.

You should find that every one of the points above covers one or more areas related to ISPs. Every single thing on the list should be achievable by even modern day ISPs and could actually be a standard, yet it's sad to see that all to often this isn't the case.

Another thing worth noting is that we have mainly covered the points above which most ISPs are failing on, there's obviously a lot more ground we could cover; Top 20 anyone =)?