ISP's

[wiskyfog]

A.T.T. SUCKS MY GONADS. That said, are there any ISP's out there YOU are happy with and can give a hearty thumbs up to good reliable connections.? (no spam plz)

[The Fugitive]

Google is your friend. Do a search for ISPs in your area (whats good here may suck there so mine might not work for you), then  run a "review" search on google for those ISPs.

[wiskyfog]

I called ATT about my rates going up 5.00 more a month for dsl. They said my one year was up. OK, np."Do you have any specials going on?" I said. oh yea, we can double your speed and it will cost 19.95 per month. GREAT lets do it. Now as I sit here with my "Oh shyte" face, remembering how good it was b4 ATT got their greedy lil hands in there and screwed everything up.Now, I'm gettin disco'd TOO regularly (about every 2-5 minutes) Called tech services, he determined that it is my dsl modem and of course he had plenty avail... only problem is they won't provide THIS VETERAN GOOD CUSTOMER with a new modem, i have to buy one.(imagine that!) The "tech" (used very loosely)did'nt find it odd at all that my issues started with them "upgrading" my speed, he suggested that my modem is too old, yea the same modem that has provided me with awesome service for years suddenly takes a crap when ATT got their greedy lil hands on my acct. hmmmm ya gotta wonder.
 

PS this all happened when i told them I did not want their "UVerse" because iwould'nt let them use autopay on my credit card.

[Bizman]

Wiskyfog, could it be possible that you're suffering of the "last mile syndrome"? You know, ADSL works in a 4 mile range from a kind of a central, the last mile being not so stable.

My ISP raised the speed up to 20/2 which caused continuous on-off looping especially after playing. The funny thing was, I could play AH but couldn't check my e-mail without a reboot after having played. They dropped the speed back to 5/1, giving no other options between, which worked perfectly. Later I found the culprit being a 10 metres long piece of ancient (1950's?) cable the other ISP who owns the cabling had left on my outside wall between the new cable and my phone outlet when they dug the cables underground. My ISP also called me once during the first 20/2 period, that my modem seems to be of ADSL 1-type, which would limit my true speed to 8 mbps, they also offered me a new ADSL 2+ modem for half price.

So check how far this "central" is from you and look at the bottom of your modem if it says ADSL 2+ on the label.

[thndregg]

I'm near the tail end of CenturyLink's DSL service (formerly Qwest), and there've been many times I've just about cancelled it, as well as AH, and gone to the ONLY other option out here, which is satellite. (Bleh.. )

Lately, it's been better, but I don't trust Centurylink. My dad was born & raised in this area through the 50's & 60's, and he used to call the phone system out here "The Dry Land Telephone Company", because the lines would crap out whenever it rained. Occasionally, that still holds true in this backward part of eastern Oregon.

[kvuo75]

even though ive heard horror stories, i've actually had really good luck with comcast... i can remember maybe 4 years ago, i had recurring problems for maybe a week... but in the last 4 years, modem has lost connection maybe 3 or 4 times.

[RedBull1]

I had Verizon, despite the Fios badass uber internet speeds I should've gotten or whatever, I never broke 1MB/s Download, .45 upload  

I wouldn't suggest Verizon to my worst enemy  

[Meatwad]

I called ATT about my rates going up 5.00 more a month for dsl. They said my one year was up. OK, np."Do you have any specials going on?" I said. oh yea, we can double your speed and it will cost 19.95 per month. GREAT lets do it. Now as I sit here with my "Oh shyte" face, remembering how good it was b4 ATT got their greedy lil hands in there and screwed everything up.Now, I'm gettin disco'd TOO regularly (about every 2-5 minutes) Called tech services, he determined that it is my dsl modem and of course he had plenty avail... only problem is they won't provide THIS VETERAN GOOD CUSTOMER with a new modem, i have to buy one.(imagine that!) The "tech" (used very loosely)did'nt find it odd at all that my issues started with them "upgrading" my speed, he suggested that my modem is too old, yea the same modem that has provided me with awesome service for years suddenly takes a crap when ATT got their greedy lil hands on my acct. hmmmm ya gotta wonder.
 

PS this all happened when i told them I did not want their "UVerse" because iwould'nt let them use autopay on my credit card.

I have personally seen problems before with older modems crapping out simply because the faster speed coming in is not what the modem is capable of handing. The modem dumps the connection and re-syncs back up to the signal in hopes of a better chance

[titanic3]

I had Verizon, despite the Fios badass uber internet speeds I should've gotten or whatever, I never broke 1MB/s Download, .45 upload  

I wouldn't suggest Verizon to my worst enemy  

Questions:

1. City? Suburb? Middle of nowhere?
2. Are you sure it was Fios? There are different types of Verizon services.
3. Did you download from a quality server? Some sites limit their downloads speed.

I know that my download from Aces High website only goes up to ~650kb/s. My downloads from Steam reaches the limit at ~3.0MB/S. I live in NYC with Fios and had flawless performance for the past 3 years. We could choose to pay more for high speeds but 3MB/S is plenty. And I've lost connection maybe 3 or 4 times in the entire year. Only once have I had to call up Verizon and ask them to manually reset my router from their server. All other times, all I had to do was restart the router.

[fuzeman]

<snip> oh yea, we can double your speed and it will cost 19.95 per month. GREAT lets do it. <snip>

Stability over speed anyday of the week.

[eagl]

Time Warner Cable in Texas was reasonably good to me although they had some really irritating fees they charged when I moved and wanted to keep just the phone service for my alarm.  I am currently using Cox in Las Vegas and the service is ok, the price is average, but they have some irritating network policies.  They block port 25 so if you use any other email service, you have to use an alternate port.  Not a big deal since it is trivially bypassed for anyone with any tech knowledge, but it is infuriating that this bogus security measure is even used in the first place.  A tech savvy person will bypass it trivially, so it only hurts people who don't know much about networking.  They block a whole slew of ports in the name of keeping their network from being used to transfer abusive network traffic but that's just nonsense since tunneling and using alternate ports still works.

Also, they have a bandwidth cap.  I don't know how restrictive it will be in use and on paper it seems like a lot, but my wife and I do image manipulation over the network so this could be more of an issue than it should be.
They have goofy rules about how many computers can be hooked up to the cable modem.  I'm not sure if that means that the cable modem is allowed to assign 3 IP addresses or what, but I have 7 devices hooked up through my broadband router and it detects this as only 1 device, so I'm not sure what the deal is.
They don't list anywhere their guaranteed sustained network throughput.  They sell their speed tiers based on a "burst" speed, which is effective for the first part of every transfer.  They also apparently detect speedtest tests so those tests always come in just a tiny bit above their advertised burst speed.  But although they specifically say the speed is increased to the advertised speed, they don't list anywhere the sustained bandwidth for any of the tiers.  For all I know, they are giving every tier the same sustained speed and only increase the burst speed for the more expensive tiers...

But so far the network has been fast and reliable, in spite of having some dumb policies and deceptive advertisements and restrictions that may or may not be a problem for any particular user.  In particular, ping times during random periods have been consistent.  YMMV, I'm in a neighborhood with large lots and single family houses so the local network is probably not over-sold.  More densely packed areas may have worse service.

[Hoarach]

Have had ATT's internet service for years including their DSL.  Switched over to their UVerse service couple years ago and its great.  Havent had issues with speeds or having a constant connection.  Like mentioned above, Im sure it depends on a lot of things including location and demand in the area.  Dont have the best package with UVerse and think its the 2nd or 3rd worst package but with speedtest figure I give accurate numbers, ping of 46 download of 11.6 mbps and upload of 1.1 mbps.

[Latrobe]

Only ever had Frontier and Comcast. Comcast (at least what I had) was very fast, but their customer service was crap. When the internet did have a problem it took them forever to get around to fixing it.

Frontier (what I have now) is even worse. Slow (but I live in the country so that's to be expected), very unstable, and even worse customer service. When the old router broke, they came over and gave us a new one. Only it wasn't new. It was apparently an older model and has many problems. They said they'd mail us a newer model to replace it.... that was a month ago. 


As far as I'm concerned, a good ISP is a myth. You just have to find the "lesser of two evils".

[zack1234]

DLM is the problem, I told sky if they throttled my connection I would leave

Dynamic Line Management, ISP in the US is very poor apparently

[ACE]

I had Verizon, despite the Fios badass uber internet speeds I should've gotten or whatever, I never broke 1MB/s Download, .45 upload 

I wouldn't suggest Verizon to my worst enemy 

My verizon internet gets 20Mb down and like 6Mb up.  Verizon isnt bad it just depends on your location.