Your ISP and You...

[pumpdog]

Just wondering if anyone out there has had serious issues with you ISP and what you have done to correct them.

I have a cable connection that is great sometimes but other times it is not so reliable. The problem I have is different everytime and sporatic. By the time someone comes out to my house it either fixes itself or they can't give me an answer and soon after TADA, it fixes itself again. Mediacom is the only ISP here that uses cable otherwise I would switch. Would DSL be any better? Sometimes dial-up would be faster than what I have.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Terry

[Dennis_Vied]

It's hard to say. I've had cable for some years now, same company, and it's been pretty reliable. You must be in a fringe type area, or the service must be fairly new.

The only thing I can say is to give it some time and see if they work out the problems.

My son-in-law has DSL, and they are pretty happy with it. But then again, it has its own set of problems, depending on how far they are from the distribution station. We happen to live in an area where service is good.

Give it some time.

[Martin_Doudoroff]

ISPs are a deeply regional issue. Generalizations are tricky, although I can confidently proclaim that no ISP keeps all their customers happy.

Many many years ago, I had ISDN. That was when I first learned to hate Verizon (they weren't called Verizon back then, though). Since then, they've given me an assortment of additional reasons to hate them, and I've gone to considerable (and successfull!) lengths to no longer do any business with them or have any dependency upon them, whatsoever.

Over the last decade, I've had a number of different sDSL (the symmetric, professional flavor) providers—at least three—and one aDSL provider.

The aDSL provider was cheap, but sucked in every imaginable way: customer service, performance, reliability. You could say I got what I paid for. I would not go down that road again.

sDSL went like this: when it worked, it worked. It wasn't the fastest, but it was a reasonable value and it enabled me to run servers hosting web sites and stuff like that. The problem with sDSL was that when it didn't work, it really didn't work. The sDSL providers I've had kept getting bought out, requiring me to go through torturous re-installations under the "new order". And no matter who you get DSL from, you're most likely going to have the local telco involved, because it's their copper network. Every time anything changed whatsoever with my DSL service, I was guaranteed trouble from Verizon. Sometimes I was completely down for weeks as Verizon techs didn't show up or some dependency was overlooked. It was during this period of my life that I began to fantasize about slaughtering Verizon executives (the field techs always seemed very courteous, competent, but beleaguered).

Luckily, I've moved past all that. Verizon is completely out of my life, as is DSL. I have the fastest, most reliable home/office Internet service I've ever experienced in Time Warner Cable. (Note that it does drop out from time to time, but generally only for a minute or two.) I no longer need sDSL because I've learned there's no up-side to me keeping my own servers—I use a smattering of co-los and shared servers.

So, back to the fundamental problem: region. I live in NYC. We have the oldest copper telephone system... well, probably in the entire world. DSL in NYC sucks, and pretty much has all along. Meanwhile, TWC has been fairly aggressive in this area and delivers pretty good internet service through their cable service. Fibre is pretty much a non-issue for most New Yorkers, although some of the bigger buildings have been "lit".

Other parts of the country have completely different situations. Alas, many areas probably have no good option at all! I have a friend in North Carolina who enjoys fibre directly to his suburban house. Unfortunately, the local carrier has structured things so that the only affordable service plans impose extremely stingy upload bandwidth limits, so while he has essentially unlimited download speeds, upload speeds are comically slow. Your mileage will vary.

Your best bet is to interview as many people as you can in your area and survey what they're experiencing. Be careful, however, that you understand their point of view, because their expectations and yours may be a lot further apart than you might first presume. Some of the best sources of info are "nerds" that play cutting-edge multi-player video games on the 'net and do a lot of (usually illicit) file sharing, because these are people who really exercise their internet services.

Hope this rant helps, somehow.

[Noel_Carboni]

Problem is, cable companies treat internet access like an entertainment service. After all, that's what they've provided, traditionally - television is entertainment. I suspect the cable repair process will have to change, and may not realize how much (!!), as they get into telephone service. What this means NOW, however in practical terms is: If you're having a problem that is not being experienced by the whole neighborhood, the cable company will take their sweet time to come out and fix it. Most likely several days.

By contrast, the phone company treats their service like a critical communications medium, and is prepared to fix your problems in hours, not days.

Up to recently, generally speaking you could get more bandwidth via cable than DSL for the same price, though this has not gone unnoticed and the phone companies are providing better internet access now for competitive prices. The higher data rates have made cable service attractive.

I have Comcast (was Adelphia) cable internet service.

I also maintain a low-cost dialup account from AT&T, for which I pay $9.95 a month. When the cable goes down I can limp along on dialup service. It's not that much more and I have the confidence of knowing I will not be utterly without internet access. I used this capability, for example, after hurricane Wilma knocked out the power infrastructure (and thus the cable system). Lo and behold the phones continued working.

If your internet access is critical to you - as it is to me to keep in touch with my customers - you might want to consider adding a dialup service as a backup.

-Noel

[LarryRyder]

It will deffinatly very by location, for me Time warner was never able to make digital cable work well so I never tried cable internet. I use DSL from SBC/AT&T and it works very well.

I have been on DSL for about 5 years now and the 2 times it started getting bad with speed and drops it turned out to be my modem, replaced it and all is well.

You may want to try a new cable modem as it won't hurt to have a spare and could be the issue.

[Martin_Doudoroff]

Originally Posted by Noel_Carboni

By contrast, the phone company treats their service like a critical communications medium, and is prepared to fix your problems in hours, not days.

There were so many times I wished my phone company treated their service as critical, but they never did.

However, you are certainly correct about the telephone systems not generally being affected by power grid blackouts. Even in cruddy old New York!

[Noel_Carboni]

Well, to be fair aDSL takes a lot more power than POTS (plain old telephone service), and they usually shut down the aDSL cards during power outages.

So dialup service will likely work longer on battery power than aDSL.

-Noel