Poll: How much are you paying for Internet Access?

[Goonie]

I have 6.0 Mbps DSL @ $54/month. I feel the need for speed!!!

Fast DSL is one of my only high cost vices.....that and wonderful slabs of quality beef on the grill!!!

BTW, my DSL includes free dial-up IF I ever need it for traveling or such. But haven't had to to use it in YEARS, as almost all the hotels that I stay at when traveling have free DSL....and most of those are wireless (if not the hotel next door or across the street has free wireless )

[jazz4cash]

I currently have comcast which is 47.95 paid by employer plus basic analog comcast cable for total of 103/mo. Two guys going door to door from Verizon offered thier new fiber optic system (FIOS) for same price plus 10/mo discount first six months plus one month free and the cable is digital w/ 200 channels. I said "ok" and they wrote me up and called in the order. The "welcome center" said I had an "alert" on my address indicating some attempted fruadulent activity in the near past, so they need me to fax 2 photo IDs? I currently have Verizon wireless plus two business lines into the home, but that was not sufficient.

I was most upset that there was some attempted fraud on my account and they never notified me and could not share any details as I had to prove who I was. More attitude basically indicating she felt she was doing me a favor.....same ol' Verizon!

Anybody know if this Verizon fiber optic service is any good?

[VoyT]

$19.99 per month for AT&T's DSL ...

[audreyh1]

We pay $60/month for Verizon Cellular Broadband. This is a great internet solution for us mobile folks and can be very fast, but it sure seems expensive. I'm hoping it drops closer to $35 or something one of these days, but that will depend on how aggressively the cell phone companies decide to compete.

Audrey

[ERD50]

$29.99 for a 'fixed wireless' connection. I get about 1Mbps connection. Burst can be faster, I think. The newer installs are also faster, I think.

I also think some people put too much emphasis on the bit rate. If I am downloading a 50MB file, it does not make that much diff to me if it takes 10 minutes or 3 minutes. Either way I'm waiting, and I'm going to do something else for that time. And web pages are generally too small to make much difference. And often, you are just waiting for the site to respond.

In fact, latency can be more important than speed. IIRC, if a web page is broken up into a bunch of requests for data, each one requires a 'handshake' back and forth. Different types of systems have different latency rates for those handshakes - that can take much more time than the download speed in many cases.

For example, this page is 122Kbits - about 2.5 seconds download time for dial-up; ~0.12 second download time @ 1Mbs; 0.04 download time @ 3Mbps. Considering there is the handshaking, and time for your computer to decode and display the page (let's just estimate 0.5 seconds), can you really tell much diff between .612 seconds (@ 1Mbs) and .54 seconds (@ 3Mbps) to display the page?

In fact, I just refreshed another page on this forum - it takes a couple seconds each time. Clearly, my 1Mbps download speed is *not* the limiting factor.

-ERD50