Ranking Internet Service Providers using Fuzzy Multi Criteria Decision Making Method

Internet service providers (ISPs) are companies that generally provide Internet-related services to customers in multiple forms. They can be classified as Access providers, Mailbox providers, Transit ISPs, Virtual ISPs, Free ISPs or Wireless ISPs. ISPs offer their services at variable costs and such offerings come with varied service levels. Different organizations and individuals pay for the acquired service or pay well in advance to acquire the same. The number of service providers grows day by day and each provider offers plenty of plans with many service levels to cater the need of different customers. Customers have to make a right selection so that they get the complete benefit out of it. The focus of this paper is to help customers to make a judicious choice using a hierarchical estimation framework. This framework uses various QoS based parameters to rank the currently available ISPs in the market using Fuzzy based Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods like Fuzzy-AHP and Fuzzy-TOPSIS.