An Honest Spectrum Internet Review, According to Customers

Although it has plans in the making to compete with fiber, Spectrum can’t top fiber-optic rivals like Verizon or Google Fiber in terms of speed or price. Even AT&T Fiber's infrastructure is more robust than Spectrum's. Spectrum technically beats Kinetic according to our overall scoring, but that's because Kinetic also offers DSL packages. 

Spectrum’s cable internet customers simply don’t get the symmetrical upload speeds that fiber internet customers do. With slower uploads, you get longer wait times and more buffering when you upload large files, post to social media, or host a livestream. Many fiber internet providers also don’t impose price hikes on their plans, so you end up paying less over time than you would with a cable provider like Spectrum.

“Spectrum needs to get rid of promo rates and drastically lower their regular rates to be competitive in areas with fiber,” one Reddit user, teavoo, told Reviews.org. “I would need a very significant discount to give up fiber for Spectrum, like maybe $35 [per month] on a regular [rate], not a promo rate.”

Spectrum customers gave Reviews.org a wide range of feedback, mainly:

• Spectrum Internet tends to be a fallback choice for folks with limited options
• Speeds may lag depending on your plan (gamers beware)
• The customer service tends to be all over the place, from über responsive to practically ghosting

Most of the customers we spoke to about Spectrum decided to sign up because they had no other viable options. Cable internet companies tend to hold a lot of sway in the regions where they operate, and it’s not uncommon for a brand like Spectrum to be the only high-speed internet option in an area.

“Spectrum was the only service provider that offered anything faster than 100Mbps download,” says Sean Huntley, a documentary producer who lives in Glendale, California with his girlfriend, Alex Brown.

“What, are you going to go to a different water company? It’s a water company,” he says.

Huntley and Brown both work in the film industry (Brown is a film editor) and their jobs require them to have a gigabit home internet plan to work from home. So they went for the fastest-possible Spectrum plan. Their speeds usually clock in at around 400–500Mbps. That’s below the 1,000Mbps ceiling advertised on their plan, but it’s common for internet connections to fall short of the absolute max. They still get plenty of bandwidth to handle downloading large video files, although uploads take longer.

They have rare outages, and setup was quick. All in all, they’re pleased with their service, even if they would prefer fiber. “It’s been competent—and compulsory,” Huntley jokes.

Conrad Burnham, a Spectrum user in Los Angeles, doesn’t have to wait long if there is an outage in his area. “They seem to respond quickly and take care of problems pretty fast,” he says.

But things haven’t gone as smoothly for other Spectrum users—experiences that mirror Spectrum’s middling ratings for customer service. When New York City customer Sakia Anwar experienced a service outage recently, she contacted technical support, only to get stuck on the phone with an upselling customer service agent. He tried to sell her a cable TV plan as she raced to get her internet back up to make it to a work call.

“I told him three or four times, ‘No, I am not interested,’ and he just would not stop,” Anwar recalls. “I think he was reading off a script or something. He was like, ‘Oh, okay, thank you for your feedback,’ and he would keep going on. I wanted to punch him in the throat.”

Robyn Straw, a Spectrum user in St. Cloud, experienced daily outages in summer 2023 that took hours each time to fix. She has missed work calls over Zoom and is now fed up with the long waits that come when she contacts customer service through the My Spectrum app.

“It’s not very customer friendly,” she says, noting that she’s now considering a switch to satellite provider Starlink.

Spectrum’s internet runs over what it calls a “hybrid fiber coaxial” network. That’s a fancy term used to describe a typical cable internet network: fiber-optic infrastructure makes up a provider’s regional backbone, and then the network switches to coaxial cable for the “last mile” to deliver data into peoples’ homes. That’s not to be confused with a fiber-optic internet service, often referred to as fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), which delivers internet entirely over a fiber network.

But while the bulk of its customers get cable internet only, Spectrum has actually been offering fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) in parts of the country. “It’s a real thing. The company installs it in ‘green’ markets not claimed by other fiber providers,” says Kevin Parrish, a staff writer (and longtime Spectrum customer) at HighSpeedInternet.com. “What it doesn’t do is install FTTH in areas it already delivers cable internet.”

It’s not clear how many homes Spectrum has connected to fiber so far—a spokesperson declined to give Reviews.org an exact number. Regardless of the network size, Spectrum’s cable offerings could eventually become as powerful as fiber as the company works to upgrade its core network to support 10Gbps symmetrical speeds.

“Our multiyear network evolution now underway will give us the ability to deliver symmetrical and multi-gigabit speeds across our entire footprint in the coming years,” Bret Picciolo, Vice President of Communications at Charter Communications, tells Reviews.org in an email.

Spectrum offers a solid deal on reliable internet, so it’s worth signing up. Take a look to see what Spectrum deals and promotions you can get.