In new heights of beating AT&T over the head...

[once_a_banana]

I continue to feel a little bad about my seemingly ever-increasing ability to get what I want out of CSRs of enormous megacorporations whose machinations I distrust. But hey, I still haven't had specially assigned super agents assigned to deal with me yet, so I must still have a ways to go... (right heathey?). In the latest, a couple weeks ago I found

Comments

[once_a_banana]

Yeah, our area up here is irritating in that Comcast cable internet and AT&T craptacular DSL are really the only choices, and both are overpriced relative to their speeds. I wish I lived in an area with Verizon's FiOS service, which is faster and cheaper! I moved to Comcast because the landlord wanted to pull out of our sharing agreement with the AT&T, since it was pretty unreliable for him, and that would've made it not much cheaper for me than getting much more reliable Comcast at 10 times the speed, with us sharing again.

Here are my current speedtest.net and pingtest.net results (note that the pingtest site works properly in Firefox but not in Safari or Chrome). What are your results with your Time Warner service?





It's also fun to try pingtests to extremely distant servers, like the one in Maputo, Mozambique, which is the most distant from us in the world at 10,750 miles! The little ball graphic goes back and forth all dopey and slow and the results are amusingly awful, with pings of more than half a second :D

[easwaran]

On speedtest I get:



On pingtest I get:



And:



It looks like you're getting generally better service than me. I have shorter ping times to the nearby server, but that's because mine is "<50 mi" while yours is "~50 mi".

[once_a_banana]

Yes we both have excellent line quality and modems and routers (all of those are necessary to get an "A" rating... and my older router was limiting my wireless downstream speeds and also giving me a "B" rating, so I wanted a newer one). The reason I have faster speeds is because I'm on a faster plan, at least temporarily (because it was part of the package deal that also gave me a free wireless modem and a $100 rebate). Comcast's current plans in my area breakdown as follows (the first number is downstream speed in Mbps, the second is upstream), and one of them seems quite a bit like yours:

• Economy: 1/.384 for $25 per month (slow, but kinda cheap I guess?)
• Performance: 15/3 for $20 per month for 6 months, and $58 thereafter unless you also buy their cable TV (in which case it's $43). This is the one I'll move to after 6 months, and it's almost identical to your service except it seems to be significantly more expensive and maybe has faster uploads (is yours sold as 15/2?).
• Blast!® (yes it really has the "®"): 20/4 for $30 per month for 6 months with the special deal I have from comcastoffers.com, and something like $67 thereafter (or $53 if I also got cable TV). This is the service I have currently, but I'll drop down to "Performance" after 6 months because 15/3 is more than enough.
• Ultra: 30/7 for $63 per month for cable TV subscribers (and a lot more if not, but I don't know the number).
• Extreme 50: 50/10 for $100 per month... probably more if you don't have cable TV.

And lately there are Comcast "Xfinity" adds on TV during the Olympics, which are advertising that "100 Mbps is coming soon". Exciting! I think Comcast has been updating their fiberoptic network such that they were able to roll out something called "DOCSIS 3.0" across much of the country in the last couple years, which is the successor to "DOCSIS 2.0". I don't really know what that stuff means or whether it's terminology for all cable internet or just Comcast, but to subscribe to their 30 Mbps tier and above you need a DOCSIS 3.0 compatible modem. It's striking how fast things have suddenly gotten in the last couple years. Without changing pricing, all of the tiers I mention above just recently got a major uptick in speed ("performance" went from 12/2 to 15/3, for example). Within a couple years I bet 100 Mbps home connections will become routine. The thing I still don't get with Comcast is the strange gap between their "economy" and "performance" tiers. With AT&T I was paying $34 for roughly 2.5/.5 service, and I would've been happy to move up to something like 8/1 rather than all the way up to 15/3 or 20/4.

[fengshui]

DOCSIS is the standard for Cable Modems, and 3.0 is the latest and greatest. There's lots of information at Wikipedia, if you're interested.

Have you tried plugging the new cable into your TV? Some Cable Companies don't bother filtering out the analog channels when they install Internet-only connections. If so, they may even put the High-Def broadcast channels on the line in unencrypted QAM256.

Here in Cox-land, we have 10/768 for $46.99, and 20/1.5 for $61.99. However, you also get 20% better speeds at the beginning of each connection for about a minute or so, so for other than long downloads, it's a little faster than the listed speeds.

The strange gap is there to get more money out of you. Someone who's willing to pay $15 more for an additional 7Mbps is not going to drop all the way down to the Economy plan. They're going to pay for the higher one, especially with DSL unable to break 7Mbps in most scenarios.

[once_a_banana]

Well, maybe. But down south, Roadrunner for example offers a 7 Mbps tier for $35 for a year and (possibly?) $45 thereafter. In my area Comcast risks customers sticking with maxed out DSL priced to be cheaper than Comcast's 15/3 tier: AT&T offers "DSL Elite" at $25 a month for new customers, or $40 for existing customers. I would've gone that route except that I didn't believe my line quality or AT&T's local hub were working properly (though it of course might have just been a problem with my DSL modem being old).

[once_a_banana]

(I meant to say that "DSL Elite" is a supposedly 6 Mbps tier -- unlike with cable, I bet it's actually never much above 5 and probably can't even reach that in a lot of locations, but new customers may not realize this)

[fengshui]

I think it's just the different competitive marketplace. Verizon and AT&Ts phone networks in LA may be better than in SF, so Roadrunner has to compete more aggressively to get customers.

I've been very happy with Cox so-far. For the few outages we've had, I've just waited an hour or so or rebooted my modem and they've come back right up. I've even kept the same IP address for the last year+.

[easwaran]

I'm having trouble figuring out what the options are on their website. I find that they charge $35 per month for 12 months for 7 Mbps, and $45 per month for 12 months for 15 Mbps. It doesn't say anything about the upload speeds and what prices change to after 12 months (if they change). I think I knew more about this when I was checking out plans, but I promptly forgot once it got started and stopped having issues when the rain stopped.

[once_a_banana]

Huh, yeah, that looks about as helpful as Comcast's site when trying to order service. I tried to look into it a little more for you, with a dummy address in the area, and I was getting an offer of 7 Mbps for $35 which would become $45 after 12 months, and an offer of 10 Mbps (not 15...) for $45 which would become... still $45 after 12 months. So that didn't make much sense! And yeah, the don't seem to say anything at all about upload speeds. Punks. I guess the best thing to do is just monitor your bills and after 12 months, check what the amount becomes and make sure it's acceptable.

[easwaran]

Oh, and I don't think I'd heard that there was any location in the US with more than two choices. I always thought it was just the cable company and the phone company. (At my building in Australia I had only one choice, which was the phone company, and they didn't do month-to-month or contracts less than 12 months.)

Now that you mention it I think I've seen ads for FiOS, but I didn't realize it was an ISP. I thought it was a TV service. Maybe I've only seen the ads in airports? I'm not sure.

[once_a_banana]

Yes, FiOS does TV -- in fact it does like TV and internet and landline, much like Comcast does. The difference is that Verizon brings the fiber line all the way to your house (!!), instead of only to a local hub that then needs to use existing coaxial cable to get to your house the way Comcast and Roadrunner etc do it (or phone-type lines to do high speed DSL for TV, internet, and phone, like AT&T's "U-Verse" does). So for those areas that have FiOS, Verizon seems to be offering pretty high speeds at reasonable prices. I think it's available in the LA area and much of SoCal, actually, so you might be interested in checking them out.

[easwaran]

Their availability checker says they don't offer that service in my area yet. It makes sense that they'd start with