[Cialug] OT: Qwest and Mediacom Internet Service Advice

[Tim Wilson]

I've had DSL service for several years, and I am quite happy with it.  The
only complaint that I have is my modem seems to be having issues.  I have to
reset it every couple of weeks because we experience slowness of loading of
pages.

I currently have my line through Qwest, and my ISP is Internet Solver.
Hopefully soon, everything will be through Internet Solver.

Before DSL, I had Mediacom, and had lots of outages.  To be fair, the last
outage could have been caused by my ancient modem.

I will say, for everyday surfing, DSL and cable modem seem to be the same.
The one place I noticed a difference is when downloading large files.
Unfortunately, the DSL I can get is slower in that aspect.  Of course, I'm
only getting 1.5mb versus the 7 I could probably get through Mediacom.  When
the switchover to Internet Solver is complete, I should get closer to 3mb.

The other thing to consider is upload speed.  In the world of "Web 2.0",
there's a lot of information getting sent back and forth.  So upload speed
is getting more important.  It's still not as important as download speed,
but it is a factor to consider.  Before I switched from Mediacom to DSL, I
was getting 3mb download and (I think) 128kb upload on cable.  On DSL, my
download was half that, but my upload was double.  So the general surfing
didn't seem to slow down.  Yeah, the data coming back from the server came
down slower, but my request to the server got there quicker, so it seemed to
be a wash, or at least, not very noticeable.  And I didn't have all those
outages!

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 10:50 AM, David Champion <dave at dchamp.net> wrote:

> Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com
> > <mailto:tdwalton at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Alan Maupin
> >     <alan.maupin at gmail.com <mailto:alan.maupin at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >     > I'm asking for advice for a friend on Internet service in
> >     Ankeny.  It's been
> >     > awhile since I've negotiated a deal and I'm not sure of what to
> >     tell her.
> >     > She's been offered two deals:   Qwest 7 mbps for $41 per month
> >     and Mediacom
> >     > 8 mbps for $39.  Since the price and download speeds are very
> >     similar what
> >     > other criteria should she consider?  One possible negative is
> >     the fact that
> >     > Qwest requires a two year contract.
> >
> >     Given the otherwise comparable plans, the contract would be a
> definite
> >     no-go for me.  Why should they get to lock you in like that?  What if
> >     you don't like the service?
> >
> >
> > CHECK the deal with Mediacom. Is that pricing only for the first 12
> > months? What does the price change to after that?
> >
> > I try to avoid mediacom purely on the principle of their misleading
> > advertising. I'm on qwest now and have had awesome reliability.
> > Mediacom wasn't bad (DNS was the biggest problem and opendns solved
> > that) but my *feeling* is that qwest has been slightly better
> > regarding reliability.
>
> All of the DSL service providers will get you roughly the same level of
> reliability, any of them is probably going to be better than a cable modem.
>
> The problem with Qwest is when you need customer support from someone
> who knows more than reading off a script, or to get your service request
> processed in a reasonable time, or even 2 weeks later when they took
> your order but didn't enter it into the service queue, or for them to
> not send you to a collection agency for a second voice line you didn't
> order (oh, that's what they did when they lost your service request!),
> and you never received a bill for.
>
> -dc
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
>



-- 
Tim
Required reading: http://bccplease.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/attachments/20091207/14c51ef1/attachment.htm