CableCanyon publishes comparisons, rankings, reviews, and buying guides for home internet, TV, wireless, and streaming services in the United States. This page explains how that content is produced: who makes the calls, what data we use, how often we update, how we correct mistakes, and how we separate editorial work from the commercial arrangements that fund the site.
Independence
No provider, affiliate network, or advertiser sees our rankings or reviews before publication. We do not accept sponsored reviews, paid placements inside our comparison tables, or “advertorial” content written or approved by a provider. If we ever publish sponsored content — for example, a clearly labeled partner post — it will be visually distinct from editorial coverage and carry a “Sponsored” label at the top.
Our commercial team, which negotiates affiliate and pay-per-call agreements with providers and networks, is organizationally separate from our editorial team. Commercial staff do not have input into rankings, reviews, or which providers we cover. If a partner attempts to condition a higher commission on more favorable coverage, we decline the deal and we document it internally.
What we rank on
When we compare providers, plans, or products, we evaluate them against a consistent set of factors:
- Price transparency and total cost of ownership. Intro pricing, post-promo pricing, equipment fees, surcharges, installation and activation fees, and promo duration.
- Real-world speed and performance. Not just the marketed download speed, but upload speed, latency, jitter, consistency during peak hours, and measured throughput at the plan tier.
- Contract and cancellation terms. Contract length, early-termination fee, auto-renewal behavior, and cooling-off periods.
- Data caps, throttling, and equipment policies. Monthly caps, overage charges, network-management practices, router rental and purchase options.
- Customer service. Hold times, resolution rates, FCC and BBB complaint volumes, and independent satisfaction surveys.
- Technical reliability. Outage frequency and duration over a rolling 12-month window where data is available.
- Availability. Whether a plan is actually installable at a given address.
Weighting
Rough weighting of those factors in our aggregate rankings:
- Price and total cost of ownership: about 30%
- Speed and real-world performance: about 25%
- Contract terms and data / equipment policies: about 15%
- Customer service and complaints: about 15%
- Availability and technical reliability: about 15%
Individual reviews and best-of lists may weight these factors differently when context demands it — for example, a “best internet for gamers” list puts more weight on latency and less on price.
Sources of data
- FCC Broadband Data Collection (BDC). The public federal dataset is our starting point for which providers serve which addresses and at what advertised speeds. We treat it as a ceiling, not a guarantee.
- Provider address-lookup APIs. We query provider availability tools directly to confirm what is actually installable at a given address.
- Affiliate pricing feeds.For plan pricing, promotional rates, and promo expiration windows, we pull from the data feeds provided by our affiliate networks and cross-check against the providers’ retail sites.
- Third-party speed databases. Aggregate anonymous speed-test data from services such as Ookla, M-Lab, and other public measurement platforms informs our real-world performance scores.
- Our own speed-test sampling.Where we have team members or volunteers on a given provider’s network, we run controlled speed tests and publish the results alongside the national averages.
- Reader reports. We read every piece of reader feedback we receive. When several readers independently report the same issue at the same provider, we investigate and, where warranted, update the review.
Update cadence
- Plan pricing: refreshed weekly.
- Plan details (speeds, caps, equipment): reviewed monthly.
- Provider reviews: full review refresh at least quarterly, with ad-hoc updates when a provider makes a material change.
- Best-of lists and top-rankings pages: reviewed and, if needed, re-ordered quarterly.
Corrections policy
If you believe something on the Site is wrong, email editorial@cablecanyon.com with as much detail as you can share. We review every submission. Our target response time is 3 business days.
When a correction is warranted:
- We update the article in place and, for material corrections, append a dated changelog note at the bottom describing what changed.
- For a factual error that materially changes a ranking or a recommendation, we also note the correction at the top of the article for 30 days.
- If the error originated from a provider feed or public source, we document that in the changelog so readers can see our audit trail.
Expert contributors and author bios
Most of our coverage is written and edited by in-house editorial staff. We also work with a small roster of expert contributors — network engineers, former ISP employees, consumer-tech journalists, and subject-matter researchers — who author or review specific pieces.
Every byline on the Site links to an author page with a real bio, previous relevant work, and contact information. We do not publish articles under invented names or AI-generated personas.
AI tools policy
We use AI tools the way most modern newsrooms do: to speed up research and drafting, not to replace editorial judgment. Specifically:
- We may use AI to draft outlines, summarize public filings, transcribe recorded interviews, and copyedit.
- We may use AI to translate or format raw provider data and pricing feeds into readable tables.
- Every article is reviewed, edited, fact-checked, and signed off on by a human editor before publication. No article is published as AI-generated text without human review.
- We do not publish AI-only content, and we do not ghost-author under a human byline using AI-generated copy that no human has substantively reviewed.
- Where AI played a meaningful role in producing a specific piece (for example, a data-heavy comparison assembled from hundreds of plan pages), we note that in an editor’s note or methodology section.
Separation between editorial and commercial
Our commercial team (affiliate partnerships, call-center relationships, advertising where applicable) operates under a firewall from editorial. Commercial staff do not attend editorial rankings meetings, do not have edit access to rankings or reviews, and do not review drafts before publication.
Any affiliate link or call-tracked phone number on the Site is disclosed on our affiliate disclosure page and, where appropriate, adjacent to the link itself. Editorial decisions — which providers to cover, which to recommend, and in what order — are not influenced by those commercial relationships.
Questions about our process? Email editorial@cablecanyon.com. If we got something wrong, we want to know.