Metronet vs. WOW Internet Providers Compared

Metronet’s prices start good and stay fair, but there’s a hidden fee

Metronet offers very attractive promotional pricing on the low end of industry rates. Their first-tier plan is only $40/month for the first year, a good 20% lower than some competitors. True, the plan’s speed is slower at 100 Mbps than some rival plans. But with fiber’s symmetrical download and upload speeds, you’re already going to have a lot more speed even at 100 Mbps than you’ll get from many cable or DSL providers. Two or three other national fiber internet providers offer promotional prices this good. The difference is that Metronet will not raise its prices dramatically when the first year is over. Metronet’s prices will rise only about $10/month at the 12-month mark. For the entry-level plan, $50 will remain the standard price from that point on. For two of Metronet’s higher-speed plans, you’ll see bigger price hikes at the 2-year point, averaging $20-30 over your original promotional rate. But the 2 Gig plan will only go from $110 to $120 after two years. But let’s cut to the chase on Metronet pricing. Even for the two mid-speed plans that undergo larger price hikes after the 2-year point, the prices are still no higher than industry averages. So, no matter which Metronet plan you pick, you’ll seemingly get a great deal to begin with, and then a good deal. There’s just one catch. Unlike many of the other ISPs, Metronet does not offer free tech support. In order to get tech support, you will have to pay $12/month for their program called TechAssure. The fee is not optional. The positive is that all of your technical needs will be taken care of. You will get full service, including any house calls or equipment repair. The negative? Adding $12 to your monthly bill wipes out a lot of the benefit from Metronet’s low promotional and standard pricing. In Metronet’s favor, the tech support fee will be the only unusual fee on your monthly bill. Because Metronet has no data caps or contracts, you won’t get any surprise overage charges or an early termination fee if you have to cancel your service.

WOW’s prices are so low they’ll WOW you

If there’s any way that WOW! can claim to have truly earned its name, it’s with low pricing. The first-tier plan will give you 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speed for only $20 a month, and that price lasts a full year. Sure, it’s not superfast speed, but 100/10 is as good as most first-tier cable internet plans. And $20/month is almost unheard of. After one year, your cost will jump to $40/month, but that’s still on the very low end of cable ISP pricing. Price hikes get lower as your plan gets faster. For example, you can get the mid-range plan at 500 Mbps download/50 Mbps upload speed for only $55/month. The shocker? There is no price hike at all. That is rock-bottom pricing for a half-Gig plan with pretty good upload speed by cable standards. It’s certainly enough speed to allow most households to do gaming and streaming simultaneously on multiple devices. A full 1000 Mbps or 1 Gig download from WOW! will run you $65 for the promotional period and $75 after the first year. That’s considerably cheaper than several other major cable providers’ 1 Gig plans, and offers the 50 Mbps upload speed that tends to be the max for cable internet. In July 2022, WOW! launched a 1.2 Gig plan as their fastest option [3]. This is an unusual speed tier given that the company already had a 1 Gig plan, and that the upload speeds for both plans are the same at 50 Mbps. But there are some advantages for the extra $20/month. The 1.2 Gig plan is the only WOW! Plan that doesn’t charge an equipment fee and doesn’t have data caps. Those are pretty good perks that probably justify the extra $20. But you did hear that correctly: WOW!’s lower-speed plans do have a couple of drawbacks that may increase their otherwise excellent prices. Those drawbacks are data caps and a $14/month modem rental fee. Fortunately, the equipment rental fee is optional, meaning that you can skip it if you provide your own modem/router instead. And the data caps are fairly high for the lowest-tier plans (1.5 TB/month) and very high for the 500 Mbps (2.5 TB) and 1 Gig (3 TB) plans. The high caps for the fastest plans make it very unlikely that you will exceed your data caps. If you do exceed them, you will get a maximum overage charge of $50/month. So, just don’t go crazy and have 40 gamers play at your house for a month. The vast majority of households will not ever approach the limits of a 2.5 TB data cap.

It’s all-fiber for the win with Metronet

There’s no getting past the fact that an all-fiber connection will give you much more speed and reliability than a cable or DSL internet connection. One of the great advantages of Metronet is that they deliver all-fiber service, every time. The fiber will run from their main network to the wall of your home. You will get symmetrical speeds, so your download and upload speeds will be the same. For any activities involving streaming, real-time gaming, and large file uploads, fiber is unbeatable. Fiber offers even more speed and bandwidth for the future. As technology continues to advance with developments such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), we will begin to need the kind of bandwidth that only fiber offers. Some fiber providers are already beginning to provide 8 Gigs and 10 gigs for residential customers. Though Metronet still tops out at 5 Gigs, their all-fiber connection will be able to meet your future speed needs. Fiber has some other benefits too. Fiber connections don’t weaken or slow in bad weather the way satellite or fixed-wireless connections do. And fiber connections are much harder to hack into or tap than a copper cable.

WOW! cable is a fast, strong choice with gigabit download speeds but slower upload speeds

Internet performance from WOW! matches the stats of the largest cable providers in the nation such as Spectrum and Infinity. You will get fast speeds from WOW!’s high-end plans that will support streaming and gaming with multiple devices. The chief disadvantage of cable internet is that upload speeds are so slow compared to the symmetrical speeds of fiber internet. If you want to do large uploads or real-time gaming on 10 devices at once in your home, there’s no question that you’ll be better off with fiber’s lightning-fast uploads. But for most households with average internet usage, a fast cable plan like WOW! internet will be good enough.

No equipment rental fees, low-cost installation with Metronet plans

For all plans up to 2 Gigs, Metronet will provide you with an eero wireless router at no charge [3]. If you are lucky enough to be able to get a 3-5 Gig plan, you will have to provide your own router to handle that level of speed. Metronet suggests a 10GB WAN/LAN compatible router such as the TP Link Archer AXE3000 [4]. Standard installation will only cost you $25 when you order a Metronet fiber internet plan. While this isn’t as good as free installation, it’s a lot cheaper than the usual $99 fee you’ll pay for installation from many ISPs.

Equipment rental fees are optional, self-installation is free for WOW!

All WOW! plans come with a free self-installation kit. If for any reason you’re not comfortable with self-installation, you can get pro installation for $50. Though most plans will allow you to rent a modem/router from WOW! for $14/month, you also have the option to supply your own equipment. This choice may be better for your budget if you plan to have service for more than a year. Just make sure you check with WOW! to be sure your router has compatible specs.

Metronet customers are usually happy with their internet service

Metronet is another ISP that is too small to qualify for major national surveys of customer satisfaction. That means that estimating customer satisfaction is more an art than an exact science – or at least more qualitative than quantitative. The good news is that on the whole, online user reviews for Metronet are much more positive than for ISP competitors who offer cable or DSL service. You don’t see some of the angry rants online about Metronet that you will unfortunately see for cable internet and DSL internet. That’s not to say that cable and DSL providers don’t frequently provide good service, because they do. It’s just statistically more likely that you will see customer rants thrown in the mix. That’s the advantage of all-fiber internet that Metronet is reaping. Again and again, companies that move toward fiber service seem to have happier customers because the networks are newer and the technology is more reliable [5]. And for that reason, we’re going to award 4 stars to Metronet’s customer satisfaction.

WOW! offers the same customer support amenities as the largest national ISPs [4]. You will get an online portal to allow you to manage your account. Telephone help is available 24/7. Online chat is available every day between 7:00 AM and 11:45 PM EST. In the J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Residential Internet Service Provider Satisfaction Study, WOW! outperformed much larger ISPs such as Cox [5]. That strong performance indicates WOW! customers are pretty happy with their service.