Americans don’t seem to connect with their Internet service providers.
A recent survey from the American Customer Satisfaction index ranked Internet service providers at the bottom of the barrel compared with other industries, including gas stations, banks and health insurance.
In Gainesville, some residents are inclined to agree with the results, and a local ISP offered possible reasons why.
Jessica Lennon, a UF advertising junior, said she isn’t surprised with the results because she’s experienced problems with Gainesville’s most prominent provider: Cox Communications.
“I’ve had some issues with power outages and their service. They’re helpful when it happens, but it happens a lot,” she said, adding that the price is too expensive for college students.
Lennon, 22, said she hasn’t completely written off the company, but she described her service as “mediocre,” which the survey provided as a reason for dissatisfaction.
The survey stated that, according to Internet users, “The ISP industry does not deliver on any aspect of customer service in a particularly impressive fashion. ISPs struggle to keep service interruptions and outages to a minimum.”
However, Maureen Tartaglione, the manager of government and community affairs for Cox Communications Southeast Region, said that often the issues users run into can be problems with bandwidth, which measures the amount of data that can flow at once.
“If you’re in an area where there’s bulk Internet usage, it can affect you,” she said.
Carl Bauer, a 19-year-old UF biology freshman, said he understands that sharing bandwidth can often be a problem, and living in a dorm has allowed him to experience it firsthand.
“Usually it’s reliable,” he said. “It’s just that when everybody in the building is trying to watch Netflix at the same time, it’s difficult.”
Dhwani Kumar, an 18-year-old UF biology freshman, agreed and said in her dorm, the wireless Internet can be “iffy.”
“Especially during the evening time it’s pretty bad,” she said. “You get to work on your homework for some time and then you start doing tests, and it gets scary because all of the sudden it’ll kick you off.”
Tartaglione said that Cox, which uses a “fiber-hybrid” system that runs a line straight from their building to each resident in their service area, is constantly making the effort to update its system.
“We’re always upgrading systems just because the demand is there for bandwidth,” she said. “We always want to be the fastest — we will spend whatever it takes.”
A version of this story ran on page 3 on 1/16/2014 under the headline "Survey: Internet tops banks as most-hated service provider"
