[Tfug] broadband opts

[Ammon Lauritzen]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Robert Zeigler wrote:
> My experience is atypical, though I have many friends who are equally
> bitter about qwest, and I haven't dealt with them in regards to dsl.  I
> hope your experience is better.

I had Qwest for about a year and a half before switching over to Cox,
and I couldn't be happier. Granted, a lot has changed (Qwest has cut
costs in order to appear remotely competitive), but allow me to
chronicle the experience.

Qwest was more than twice as expensive as Cox and would randomly trump
up charges that never seemed to make sense. Startup cost for DSL was
much higher - after my Cisco 678 blew out (unknown causes), I was
literally unable to find any ethernet DSL modems in town and would have
had to order one online (all modems for sale in local shops were USB-only).

The DSL installation took a week of waiting before they would flip the
switch, cable was on the same afternoon. When switching over to Cox, I
was able to purchase one of many modems in town. When my first modem
died after a power spike, I was able to drive around the corner to Best
Buy and pick up a replacement and get it partitioned in under 30 minutes
total.

My bandwidth with Qwest was 640/256, the highest they offered in my
neighborhood. Cox initially gave me 1mb down and about the same up I
believe. Of course, Cox's basic service is now 4mb down and the price
hasn't increased.

Qwest was also a hassle having to write two different checks every
month, one to them and one to my ISP. Now they offer a combined service,
but at the time their partner ISP was MSN... and there was no way on
earth I was going to deal with that.

With DSL, I was able to run server type applications from home, despite
my lousy upstream. Their service was generally a hair more reliable, but
when it went down it went down hard and pretty much killed a day or two
of connectivity. Cox would require me to upgrade my service to a
business account if I wanted to host mail and stuff from home - their
list of allowed incoming ports is much more restrictive. Cox does seem
to have more frequent downtimes and service interruptions than Qwest
did, but they have rarely lasted more than an hour or so for me.

I no longer use Qwest for my home phone because they pissed me off so
much whenever I had to call them. I've had to call Cox about 3 or 4
times, and only once was it with a complaint (they had rewritten their
web page to detect browser and refused to let anyone in who wasn't using
IE for windows... so I vented at everyone I could get transferred to).
The rest of the times, things went quite normally and questions/requests
were resolved quickly.

My general conclusion on the subject has become:
 - DSL is good for business applications and home-based servers
 - Cable is good for home use, is more convenient, and is more economical

Ammon
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCvCYyR9XALM4wLEoRAoAaAKDDcEp/lGzYvjthhnPUA6O6zDabgACgiWrs
olcIREQUKtfO+tZzIEX+ufo=
=sf4T
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----