If you can get fiber internet from Frontier, it's fast, affordable and reliable. If you only have DSL from Frontier available in your area, the internet will be slower and more expensive for what you get. The good news is that Frontier is constantly expanding its 100% fiber network across the United States.
Google Fiber offers affordable gig speeds with no contracts, data caps, fees, or fuss. Unfortunately, it’s still hamstrung by extremely limited availability.
Verizon Fios offers fast, reliable fiber internet, along with one of the best overall customer experiences in the business. Verizon Fios is highly recommended, and it's one of the best home internet providers we reviewed.
Frontier offers exceptional fiber internet at a low price. Prices vary depending on your service area and eligibility, and starting prices are an amazing deal. Here are Frontier's current Fiber offerings, which includes a discounted price for 12 months when you sign up for autopay:
Frontier fiber service is generally an excellent value. You can get 500 Mbps for around $45 per month or 1 gig for around $65, both of which are excellent prices well below the national benchmark for similar plans. (1) If you get 2 gigs for around $100 a month or 5 gigs at about $130, you'll enjoy excellent reliability and super fast speeds.
Some Frontier internet plans come with extras for free, depending on eligibility. If you sign up for the 5 gigs, free tech support is included. These are all great prices for the value you're getting. Some Frontier plans may come with expert installation or a Wi-Fi router included at no charge.
If you sign up for Frontier's DSL plan, it's quite a bit slower than fiber internet, but it's a great choice if you're in a rural area. Frontier's DSL plan is around $50 per month for up to 115 Mbps, but the actual speed varies heavily with the specific area you’re in. The good is that Frontier guarantees its DSL pricing for two years and doesn't require you to sign a contract. That's definitely a rare perk in the internet world!
Frontier offers fiber in a good portion of its coverage area, but if you're off the beaten path, DSL is a great solution and Frontier offers fast DSL speeds, depending on where you live. (4)
Google Fiber internet is an excellent value for the money. There are only two plans: 1,000 Mbps (1 gig) for $70 per month and 2,000 Mbps (2 gigs) for $100 per month. The 1 gig plan is among the most affordable we’ve seen at that speed, costing a little more than half the national benchmark fro similar plans (1). The 2 gig option is also drastically cheaper than many other providers’ similar offerings (if they even have a 2 gig plan). There’s no budget option for those who don’t need speeds this fast, but for what Google does offer, the value is hard to beat.
Verizon Fios is an excellent value overall. The provider offers three fiber-to-the-home plans, starting at about $50 per month for 300 Mbps, which is more for the money than you’ll get with many competitors.
Even though this is Verizon’s “slowest” offering, it’s still extremely fast and should cover a wide variety of households. In fact, we interviewed one customer who lives in a household of five internet users—two adults working full time from home, three children streaming videos and playing video games, and a plethora of internet-enabled smart home devices. She feels like they pay a good price for the 300 Mbps plan without losing out on speed. "I rarely have to think about it," she said. "If I don't have to think about it, then it's working."
The mid-tier plan is also a solid value. The highest-tier gigabit option is less competitively priced, at closer to $90 per month. However, that's still about 25% lower than the national benchmark for similar plans. (1) And you do get the benefit of symmetrical download and upload speeds with all of Verizon’s fiber internet plans, which you won’t find with every provider. This helps offset the cost somewhat. For an additional $10 each month at the highest tier, you get 2 TB of cloud storage, a subscription to Disney+, and a MoCA adapter for internet gaming.
It's worth noting that Verizon also offers DSL internet in some areas, with download speeds as high as 15 Mbps and bundled prices in the range of $75 per month, but is phasing it out in 2023. That's awfully slow compared to fiber internet, and quite expensive, but it's better than nothing. The good news is Verizon is rapidly building out its fiber-to-the-home network, so many households that have been stuck with DSL may soon be eligible for Fios.
Frontier's fiber internet performance is excellent, with speeds up to 5,000 Mbps and no data caps to limit you. In fact, Frontier's fiber plans are some of the fastest (2). Frontier's fiber internet has the fastest ping of any provider, according and a study by the FCC (3), and it's neck and neck with the competition in terms of speed and reliability. These fiber plans also offer symmetrical speeds, which means the upload speed is equal to the download speed. This is crucial if you upload or share a lot of large files, do video calls, or play games online in real-time.
Where fiber isn't available, Frontier offers pretty fast DSL internet. Frontier offers upload speeds up to 115 Mbps, but the speed you get relies heavily on where you live. For many households, 115 Mbps is plenty, especially if you don't stream HD video or have multiple people online at the same time trying to do video calls or gaming online.
Google Fiber is one of the fastest internet providers and offers excellent performance. The speeds are more than enough for even the heaviest users, and there’s enough bandwidth to power a whole household of HD streams. Since this is fiber, upload speeds are also excellent—1,000 Mbps on both plans. Unlimited data is the cherry on top of this delicious internet sundae. Our only knock is that some providers have started offering even faster speeds (though the majority of households won’t need more than what Google offers).
Performance is where Verizon Fios really shines. PCMag named it the fastest Major Internet Service Provider in 2022—and the 9 years before that. (2) The fiber-optic connections are rock solid, and the speeds offered are excellent.
Additionally, all plans have symmetrical download and upload speeds, which is ideal for anyone who uploads a lot of content. Some competitors have started offering 2,000 Mbps (or faster), but the vast majority of households won’t need those multi-gig speeds, so Verizon customers aren’t really missing out.
The likelihood of maintaining those fast advertised speeds reliably is also better with a fiber provider like Verizon than it is with some other internet types, but your experience may vary by location. In an interview, a Fios customer of over three years said that she sticks with Verizon because of the reliability even more than the price. At her current home in Buffalo, NY, she didn’t have any service outages or slowdowns even through the massive blizzards in 2022. When she previously used Verizon Fios in the Bronx, NY, the infrastructure had more outages and maintenance, though it was still faster and more reliable than another provider she tried in the area.
If you can get only DSL with Verizon, you'll only be able to download at speeds up to 15 Mbps and will pay a lot for the privilege. If you have any other option, we'd usually recommend it.
Frontier offers fantastic value when it comes to equipment and installation. If you have Frontier's DSL internet, the equipment itself is fairly standard. It's free, which is nice, but you might still want to use your own gear if you need more control over which devices on your network get bandwidth priority. DSL installation typically costs $85, and there's no self-install option. Depending on your plan and service area, you may qualify for free installation.
If you have fiber internet from Frontier, you're in luck! You get free rental of an eero 6 on the Fiber 1 Gig plan or an eero6E mesh Wi-Fi system, on the Fiber 2 Gig plan. If you have the 5 Gig plan, you'll get the TP-Link AXE300 6E with an optional TP-Link RE815XE Wi-Fi extender for an extra $10 per month. You could still technically use your own gear, but it's hard to do any better than the latest and greatest from eero and TP-Link.
If you're eligible, you may be able to get a Frontier self-install kit—otherwise, a professional will come to your house to install the internet for you. If you need a pro to come out, you may be charged $50 on your first bill. In some areas, professional installation is included free, if you're eligible.
Frontier makes cancellations easy. Cancellation is also free, but some customers are charged a $20 restocking fee for rented fiber gear and a $50 restocking fee on DSL gear.
Equipment is another area where Google Fiber really shines. Installation of the fiber jack is free, and there are no monthly fees for the network box, which functions as both a modem and router. This means that, outside of any state-imposed access fees, the advertised prices are what you’ll actually pay for broadband internet service. Many other providers end up costing $10–$15 more per month due to equipment rental fees, so this is a refreshing change of pace.
Additionally, Google doesn’t charge any sort of activation fee. This is another area where other internet providers sometimes get you—they advertise free installation, but charge a significant “activation fee” that negates the deal.
On paper, Google Fiber and its equipment are fantastic. We had to bump this score down, however, because of the slow pace of installation. Some customers complain of having to wait for months or even years to have fiber installed at their homes, even after the fiber-optic cables have been laid in their neighborhoods.
Verizon Fios offers a pretty standard equipment setup for fiber: an optical network terminal (ONT) and a wireless router. Routers are included at no extra cost on each plan, and the fastest plan comes with an included mesh network called Whole-Home Wi-Fi.
Installation costs $99, and there’s no self-install option. A current Verizon Fios customer who moved from one city to another said that they didn’t have to pay for pro install because they use their own equipment and their new home was previously wired for Fios, so it’s worth checking whether you need installation at your address. If you do need installation and order online, Verizon will waive the fee. This can be an easy way to save some money on your first internet bill. That said, while the fee is expensive, it’s not unheard of among internet service providers.
The Frontier customer experience is a mixed bag. The service itself is fairly reliable—especially the fiber. The DSL service is relatively stable, but more prone to slowdowns during heavy traffic times (which is typical with all DSL internet).
Frontier has received low scores in customer satisfaction from organizations like the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). (3) The provider ranked second-worst in overall satisfaction in the most recent surveys, falling below average. The complaints we’ve seen point generally to a broad pattern of poor customer service, so if that’s a key factor in your choice of provider, you might want to steer clear until Frontier can sort out its issues.
If you order Frontier internet, the only way to order internet service is to call in. It works okay for most people, but some folks love the convenience of handling everything without having to deal with phone trees, wait on hold, or talk to a live human. At least the hold music is nice, though, and you can enter info via text message!
Given the excellent speeds, (relatively) affordable pricing, and lack of fees, it’s safe to say that living with Google Fiber makes for a fantastic experience. For the most part, you can just do what you need to do online and forget that you even have an internet service provider, which is great. When Google anticipates a change to your account or service, it generally lets you know well in advance.
If you do end up needing support, you’re dealing with Google. In general, this means really good online help and so-so phone support. That said, we’ve seen comparatively few customer service complaints about Google Fiber, and our own experience with Google Fiber has been that we rarely need customer support anyway. The company claims (2) it topped results in over 20 categories in an American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey, but the actual results of that survey don’t appear to be public, so all we have are anecdotes.
Something else that we love about Google Fiber is how straightforward the billing is. The monthly statements are very clear about how much you owe and when you’ll be charged compared to the sometimes confusing internet bills from other providers, so there’s no ambiguity about charges. You can also access your account and billing info using your Gmail login, so you don’t have to worry about yet another username and password.
If there’s a leader in internet customer experience, it’s probably Verizon Fios. The service is absolutely rock solid, with hardly a hiccup. This, combined with the excellent speeds, makes for a seamless internet experience—it just works.
Verizon also consistently scores well in customer satisfaction. In fact, it took the top spot this year in the ACSI benchmarks (3), tied with AT&T. Meanwhile, PCMag's readers rank Verizon Fios third in overall satisfaction (4).
Connecting away from home is the only place Verizon falls short. With services such as AT&T and Xfinity, subscribers get access to a nationwide network of free hotspots. Verizon doesn't have this offering (but also doesn't trick you into using your home router to let strangers connect).