IT AI Index

Index › Products › Spectrum Business · October 2026 Edition

4 categories · Named, not ranked

Spectrum Business

7Judge labels

0First choices

4Negative labels

5 / 14Models named it

4Categories

October 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table v2026-10.8, every buyer segment counted.

Standing

5 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. Spectrum Business was named 5 times in Business phones and 3 other categories, where RingCentral led with 29%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business40 of 72

under the label threshold

Mid-market69 of 75

under the label threshold

Enterprisenot named

No model named it for this buyer.

In business phones · each standing computed within its segment · bars are 0 to 100 · the accent bar is the product's own best reading

Standing by category

Every category where a model named Spectrum Business for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant	Since September 2026
Business phone systems	IT operations and endpoint	0%	69 of 75	100%	2	under 10 labels · led by RingCentral at 29%
Data center networking	Network and edge	0%	117 of 165	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Arista Networks at 27%
DNS filtering	Network and edge	0%	87 of 94	100%	1	under 10 labels · led by DNSFilter at 59%
SD-WAN	Network and edge	0%	64 of 73	100%	1	under 10 labels · led by Fortinet Secure SD-WAN at 50%	newNew since September 2026: not ranked then, 0% now.

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Spectrum Business yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment and per category, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Spectrum Business across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Fourteen models, six prompts per category.

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Model	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	2	2
Perplexity Sonar	0	0	0
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	0
Mistral Small	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0
Kimi K2	1	0	1
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	0	0
MiniMax M2.5	0	1	1
GPT-6 Luna	0	0	0
Muse Glimmer 30B	0	0	0

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct0 labelsNone

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative1 labelNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative5 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative7 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 0 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

No positive label carried a quote.

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“Examples cited as problematic: Windstream, Spectrum, and similar carriers... "Avoid at all costs"” MiniMax M2.5 · SD-WAN · negative prompt · hard negative

“Default DNS from Your ISP (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Spectrum, etc.) Verdict: Avoid entirely.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · DNS filtering · negative prompt · hard negative

“Contract terms are the worst in the industry” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Business phones · negative prompt · hard negative

“ISP-Bundled VoIP Systems (Proceed with Caution)” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Business phones · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Spectrum Business, over the 7 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Spectrum Business was named but was not.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

8x83 of 70Not among the top eight

Nextiva3 of 70Not among the top eight

RingCentral3 of 70Not among the top eight

Asterisk2 of 70Not among the top eight

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN2 of 70Not among the top eight

Comcast Business VoiceEdge2 of 70Not among the top eight

Dialpad2 of 70Not among the top eight

FreePBX2 of 70Not among the top eight

LevelBlue2 of 70Not among the top eight

VMware VeloCloud SD-WAN2 of 70Not among the top eight

A head-to-head page exists where both products are among a category's top eight. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Spectrum Business. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, five of the fourteen in this edition, so these counts come from 7 of the 7 answers that named Spectrum Business and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

reddit.com5

trustpilot.com3

capterra.com2

checkthat.ai2

cisco.com2

cloudtalk.io2

getvoip.com2

guideflow.com2

hummingbirdnetworks.com2

interfacesystems.com2

Twenty-four of the twenty-four domain citations in answers naming Spectrum Business came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

checkthat.ai/answers/what-are-the-best-business-phone-system-pbx-solutions2

guideflow.com/blog/sd-wan-software2

hummingbirdnetworks.com/articles/the-world-s-worst-business-phone-systems2

interfacesystems.com/blog/top-sd-wan-vendors2

jhbtele.com/best-worst-phone-systems2

trustpilot.com/review/www.ringcentral.com2

trustpilot.com/review/www.vonage.com2

youtube.com/watch2

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

spectrum.com ranks 4 on Google for the category's searches. In the answers, Spectrum Business takes 0% of first choices and RingCentral takes 29%.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Position for “business phone system”

–

not in the top ten

Position for “business phone systems”

In answers

This edition

Share of first choices

rank 69 of 75 in business phones

Segment leader

29%

RingCentral

First choices: 0 across its categories
Named in: 7 answers
Its own site cited: in 7 of the answers that named it

Search figures are US estimates from DataForSEO, read October 5, 2026; AI search demand is its modeled, directional estimate, not a count of queries to any assistant. The answers are this edition's. Two measurements side by side: neither is read as the cause of the other.

What it publishes

ShowHide

Addresses on spectrum.com

6,668

subdomains included

Content

291

counted in the table below

Documentation

Product · Integration

0 · 0

Kind	Pages	Last 90 days
Glossary or explainer	181	undated
Blog	106	undated
Report or ebook	2	undated
News or press	2	undated

How it is countedHide how it is counted

Every page spectrum.com exposes, subdomains included. Kind is read from the address and title. The last 90 days, the latest date and the twelve months count pages by when they were published, from the site's feeds, a date in the address, or the page's own publication date, read from up to a hundred of its most recently changed pages; a page that says only when it last changed is counted in its kind but not in when, so the recent counts are a floor, and a kind none of whose pages gives a publication date reads undated. Read September 29, 2026.

Names read as Spectrum Business

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Spectrum Business; a claim can dispute any of them.

Spectrum 3NVIDIA Cumulus Linux / Spectrum 1

Follow Spectrum Business

An email the morning each edition publishes: where this product moved, where it held, and by how much against the noise floor. One address, confirmed by a click; a stop link in every email.

Already following? Everything you follow, with a stop for each.

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Spectrum Business's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Spectrum Business, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

What a new claim receivesHide what a new claim receives

A new claim receives the current edition's vendor brief for Spectrum Business by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where Spectrum Business is named, by buyer and by framing, and which cells hold its first choices;
the claims the models make when they name it, ranked, with the strongest and the weakest quoted;
its vocabulary against the segment leader's, and the pages the models cited;
who was chosen in the answers that did not name Spectrum Business, and every reason the record gives;
a battlecard for each top rival: the head-to-head split, why they win, and the reservation quoted against them;
one page of published figures cleared to show a buyer.