Tips for Choosing the Best ISP for your Needs

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i pretty much live in the middle of nowhere. the fastest speed i can get that isn’t comcast is 1.5 dsl. it sucks but it is pretty reliable. whenever i have a problem that i can’t easily fix my self i call them up and in about 3-5 minutes i am back online. all my friends have comcast and they are always complaing about terrible speeds and lost connections (not to mention blocked ports). hopefully fios will be here before i die.

I love it ,the question is What ISP is reliable. And the answer is NONE. T he only ISP we can get is SBC. AT&T , which owns sbc isn’t as fast as what they advertise. I only get ,according to Speedtest.net(tinyurl.com/gqokd)mydownload speed is only (1847kb/s )and my upload is only(395kb/s). This is about 300 kb/s short of the mark. The price was good at $19.95 per month, however after the starting period it went to $29.95 which isn’t as good as some I’ve seen. Unfortunately this is what I have to work with other than Bright house cable. They are even worse.

well, in the last 10 years I have had 5 different ISPs, most of which were all DIAL UP ISPs, each one had an OK connection for the time, but had issues which made me change to a new ISP. of the last 4, they were all local providers. I let the first one, beacause, well, they were $15 a month, and second, the conneciton would constanly drop. NO TELEPHONE SUPPORT. ISP #2 wes OK, but was $16 a month, left them beacuse of same issue, dropping connection, not much telephone support, email was only easy way, but person to person support, was always Bull S&*% support to make me fo away, which I did. ISP #3, which is also my cable company, had them the longest, but at $18 a month, connecion was ok , I also had a backup ISP, thru work for FREE… I left ISP #3 due to email issue, and used online support, but here the catch, my FREE ISP was also MSN, which, HA HA, was my job to support for satillite, DSL, dial up, cable modems, and ISP compaq crapper machine… so when I had an email issue, and was told the dreaded contact your OEM, I knew, ISP reject. which comes to ISP #4, MSN, kept it for about 1 month, reason, of course, $22 a month. switched to PeoplePC as a national ISP, for HA HA $10.95 a month, dropped the dial up last November with PeoplePC, for, what else PeoplePC BB 1.5MB DSL line, for ….$10.95 a month for the first 6 months, then $39.95 for next 6 months of contract. best thing about it.. my local telephone company BellSouth runs the line, provides the hardline support, but my support is not 100% PeoplePC support, they are a small subsidery of EarthLink ISP, and they do at times slip up and say earthlink… which is OK with me, I know that the main company is Earthlink. but my complaints with PeoplePC… the fastest I have downloaded is at most 150KBPS, not the 1.5MBPS as promised, but hey, anything is better than dial up. oh, I have a family member that at works also uses a DSL line for office work, and here the best part, even the fastest speed is also 150KBPS, but it too is thru a local ISP, and the local Telephone company, but it is not BellSouth. still, it works, which is all I care about. but remember, I did my own ISp support for the longest time…. and will never do it again if I can help it. people calling in were rude and did not want to listen at times.. what is worse, NYC would call in after 9-11-2001, just a couple of days later wanting support for their businesses…. which MSN did not allow, it was always for personel non-business usage. and even worse, they did not relize that ground zero had all the telco routers in the basement for NYC and busy signals were rampant for many weeks afterward. a cable connection quite honestly, is fast, but add 100 users, and truthfully, dial up is then much faster, even a 6-10 MBPS will beat it on a busy school night due to bandwith goes downhill with more users.

I have the exact say problem. My internet daily has problems and I’m almost 100% sure it has to do with the ISP. This is a nice list, gave me some things to consider. I think I’m gonna have a good talk with them or search for a new one. Thanks Chris.

I have Verizon Fios, I used to have Comcast Cable internet the difference in advertised speeds and quality between the two is night and day here.. Comcast offered and I payed for I think it was their “Gamer” Package. Which was a few dollars more per month and the speeds were advertised as 8000/768 Mbps. There was also this thing they called Speed Burst technology which would let you get up to 12Mbps for a period. I never really cared as much for download speed but I think I was getting the amount as advertised most of the time, the upload was a whole whopping 768, Were talking almost a whole 1 Mbps. Now that should of allowed me to upload at around 96kb/s, Nope I still got around 40kb/s. Since I run Web Servers and Game servers that are located in a data center in Texas so I really needed the upload and I didn’t get nearly what I was paying for.
I was very disappointed, and enough for me to call and complain to Comcast’s wonderful customer service, they in turn forwarded me to tech support. Tech support didn’t understand why I was complaining since my download speeds were fine and they didn’t understand the difference between me uploading files to my server and me being a server, they kept telling that upload is limited so that I cant run a server from home! Ugh! Idiots. Luckily soon after that Verizon Fios became available and I quit being Comcastic that day!
Now Fios, all I can say is WOW. I started off with a pleasing 15/2 Mbit package for a reasonable 49.99/mo. Then maybe two months later a 15/15 package became available in my area for about 15$ more a month totaling $64.95/mo, not bad at all. Now what was really a big surprise is that I was actually getting 15Mbps (1875KB/s or around 1.8MB/s) for my downloads, now when your downloading and the dialog window for the download switches from kb/s to MB/s thats pretty damn cool if you ask me. The best part was I could UPLOAD at the same exact speeds! No more waiting for hours to upload large game files or site/database backup files, they took just a few minutes! If you took my upload away from me I really would break down and cry, im serious!
Another cool thing is the give you this big clunky Actiontec router, and you will need to keep that connected if you have the TV service to get your channel guides and other things, but with one phone call you can ask to have the connection switched from the coax over to the Ethernet port on the ONT that they install on the outside of your residence and run Cat5e or Cat6 to your Own router( you will either have to clone the mac address or have them release it, I prefer to just clone it so I can switch routers at will). So I hooked up my WRT54G that I have 3rd party DD-WRT firmware on and just connected the actiontec WAN port back into one of the 4 Ethernet ports on the WRT54G to get my topset tv boxes have their ip’s and internet for them to get their channel guides and other stuff. So all in all Verizon’s Fios is just simply awesome. Sometimes I get on a broadcaster site similar to Ustream and I can broadcast for friends at very high quality and framerates along with very high quality audio with my logitech HD webcam. The best part is I don’t need another connection to do other things like downloading, uploading, or even watch another broadcaster like Chris heres’ stream without a hitch or buffering of my stream! Fios right now in my opinion has the best network, it doesn’t even slow down for me at peak times like my shared comcast did or even before that my DSL that even slowed at peak times of the day. Chris’s broadcasts and video’s would defiantly benefit with Verizon Fios and its a shame that he has to pay for 2 separate connections (Cable and DSL?) and suffer through the horrible “Comcastic” experience.
sorry for that really long comment, I’m a new viewer but I really wanted to share my 2 cents on this subject! =)

I am lucky to have FIOS from Verizon here , costs more, but more than worth it. Maybe someday all will have an ISP with their quality !