[Cialug] DSL v. Cable (Ankeny)

[Nathan C. Smith]

>> I had to unplug and plugin my cable modem again last night.  I've had
lots of little
>> outages with Mediacom.  Frankly, the little outages are worse than a
major one.  It gets 
>> frustrating to go to a page and it loads fine, only to click a link on
the page and you 
>> get a timeout error.  

I had issues like this one time, back in the transition from ATT to
mediacomm time frame (before everything was NATed).  I was paying an extra
$5/mo for a second IP address.  Then I started getting disruptions and
nothing was working, I switched to the second IP address for a while.  When
I got around to fixing the problem (using their freakin' chat system they
had back then) they denied that I had two ip addresses and determined that
somebody else was using the one that had gone flaky on me.  So I cracked
open my voluminous email archive, found the messages and sent them to the
rep.  "yep, says it's yours but we don't do this".  So their policy had
changed and turned extra-double secret.

It was after this I realized I never wanted to deal with Mediacomm again.

You can deal with some friendly small DSL providers (whatever happened to
open access ISP on cable?) like freese-notice or internet-solver, or whoever
is in your area.  With a small provider you get service from people who do
"the whole enchilada" for a living  and take a blow to their own ego when
things go down.  And you can walk into their office and talk to them or
stalk them at their houses if things go really wrong.

Besides, sometimes they don't mind when their customers do their own tech
support.  Or at least can relate what they are asking (the white box with
two blinkers on it?)

The lure of big bandwidth is tempered by memories of this experience, having
my cable physically cut 3 times, and NAT.

Good luck.

BTW, I used to be very anti-DSL.

-Nate