ISP Wars
Before we moved I put in an order to transfer my service with Verizon, including DSL. I thought it would only take 3 days at most to transfer service. Unfortunately, the predicted â˜ready dateâ™ was two weeks, October 18th to be exact. It was not possible for me to be without access to the internet for longer than at least a week and that was still pushing it. While waiting for the DSL service to be activated Verizon offers complementary dial-up in the mean time. This didnâ™t mean much to me as my main desktops donâ™t even have modems! However, all of the laptops do, but Iâ™m spoiled by broadband so it didnâ™t matter.
My solution to the two week wait was to have Road Runner turned on when the cable was being switched.
The first thing I do is check my bandwidth: 4.7Mbps/359Kbps.
Oh, the speed Iâ™ve been dying to get DSL to pump out.
Two days after Road Runner is connected, my DSL is suddenly active, according to James Earl Jones when he called to inform me of the news.
I hook up the DSL and get a direct wired connection to my laptop and check its speed: 1.5Mbps/367Kbps. Which is actually faster than my previous connection with DSL.
Which puts me into a dilemma: Iâ™m wondering which ISP to call to disconnect service. Iâ™ve been doing pros and cons for a while now and Iâ™m still stuck.
Road Runner:
Roughly four times fast than my DSL. This is my only pro, obviously. However, the cons:
Road Runners Usenet , justâ¦just, well, it SUCKS. Newsgroup retention is 2 days, if Iâ™m lucky. Everything is incomplete and doesnâ™t carry five of my regular groups. Road Runner is never stable for me. Every three days the connection is out for "maintenance".
Verizon DSL:
Usenet retention is about 11 days. Never incomplete. Carries all of my groups. The speed is two times faster than my previous speed with DSL. I've only experienced two outages with DSL in two years.
Now, I can keep road runner and subscribe to a premium news server, like Giganews. But for the package I want Iâ™ll be paying an extra $25.00 a month. Which, I probably would do if I wasnâ™t paying $30.00 a month in online games already.
Well, after going through this list in text, I think Iâ™m going to stay with DSL and cancel Road Runner. Yeah, thatâ™s what Iâ™ll do. I think.
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