Poll: How much are you paying for Internet Access?

[chinaco]

Interested in how much internet access if costing you. I made some assumptions on costs. I probably have too many categories...

I was using dial-up for years and had been wanting to get broadband, but I could not bring myself to pay the $45 to $50 it cost.

One day in the newspaper, I saw an AOL add that offered Broadband for $24.95 as a permanent offer. The broadband ws offered by Time Warner. The offer did not last for long. later Time warner and AOL made some changes and the offer went away. I am still getting my low rate.

Please post any comments that may shed light on your deal if it needs explanation.

Personally, I feel that Broadband is too expensive. Where is the competition?

 

[dex]

one issue is phone service - My internet access is 24 but I have to have a phone line for 21 that I wouldn't need if I didn't have internet service.

 

[txdakini]

And there are differences in the speed rate of broadband services. I pay 39.99 a month (plus phone line) but my download speed is 6 MB/sec. Upload is about .768 MB/sec. I could pay cheaper rates, even down to 14.99 with the same company (AT&T), but I spend a lot of time on the computer and for me, this is not a place I want to cut back. I'm thinking about cutting back to the 24.99 service which is 3 MB/sec just to experiment and see if I actually notice the difference and it frustrates me.

I agree that it costs too much.

 

[Mysto]

This is really a sore point with me. I can get dial up or I can get Comcast High Speed at $50 a month. Even though I live in the big city I am too far away for DSL and there is no competing broadband company in my area.

Every month I feel like they have a gun to my head. (They act like it too)

 

[al_bundy]

i get free dsl and cell phone from my employer. i pay for vonage, but i'll probably get a free land line soon as well. if i had to pay i would probably just do the all in one package from time warner cable for TV, digital phone and internet.

 

[Sue J]

We have broadband cable internet through Time Warner Roadrunner for $44.95 a month. We dropped our cable TV service when we switched to satellite a few years ago and the price for the cable internet stayed the same. Years ago, they used to charge a fee to have cable internet without the TV service.

We've had Roadrunner cable since Jan. 1997. Our local area was the first test area for Roadrunner starting in 1996. It was a good service then, with some growing pains. After the first year or two it's been fantastic, very reliable and worth the price for the four of us.

 

[DangerMouse]

We are paying the same as Sue. However, having enjoyed the luxury of cable internet for years I could never go back to dial up or anything slower. I am so impatient that if I am put in a situation where I have to use dial up I am ready to do someone some harm in the time it takes a page to load.

 

[fluffy]

Comcast, Time Warner, and probably other cable internet services have negotiable pricing I've been paying $19 or $29/mo for Comcast/TWC for several years when the "list" price is $45 or $49. Simply call in and tell the CSR that DSL is being offered in your area for $15/mo or whatever it happens to be (they can't check anyways) and that you are considering switching. They'll usually offer you a 6- or 12-month "special" pricing to keep you as a customer. Sometimes they won't offer till you bluff and tell them you want to cancel. And sometimes it takes a couple calls -- one CSR may not offer it but another will. But for 30 minutes on the phone you can save a couple hundred bucks per year on broadband. After your special pricing period is up, repeat the process.

 

[loosechickens]

We pay $59.99 for mobile satellite broadband.....one of the few things that are more expensive in this nomadic motorhome life than with a fixed base home. Another is cost of mail forwarding......but put next to the gods making the electricity on the roof, no utility bills, no property taxes, no mortgage and abundant sunshine and great weather all year, not to mention the size of our neighborhood....who can complain

LooseChickens

 

[figner]

I've had a "temp promo price" for 3-4 years now, so I'm not sure how to vote. Each year
without asking I've been offered a new, lower price good for 1 year. Living in a major metro
area with reasonable competition between providers, I see no reason this trend won't
continue. The promo pricing is now $18/mo for DSL, the regular listed price
is probably around $35-$50 but I'm not sure it'd be worth paying for at that amount.

 

[donheff]

I am paying a little extra to a private ISP so I can run a couple of web servers in the basement for sh**ts and giggles. Last time I looked Verizon prohibited it.

 

[rec]

I am a cheapskate at 39.95 a year.
http://vtisp.com/

 

[Corporateburnout]

And there are differences in the speed rate of broadband services. I pay 39.99 a month (plus phone line) but my download speed is 6 MB/sec. Upload is about .768 MB/sec. I could pay cheaper rates, even down to 14.99 with the same company (AT&T), but I spend a lot of time on the computer and for me, this is not a place I want to cut back. I'm thinking about cutting back to the 24.99 service which is 3 MB/sec just to experiment and see if I actually notice the difference and it frustrates me.

I agree that it costs too much.

I pay $30 for my 3 MB/sec DSL from verizon with a wireless modem/router. I doubt that you will find such a big difference. I can hardly notice the difference from the network at my workplace which is 10 Mbs.

 

[bssc]

Free Cox broadband since my wife's MegaCorp pays for it.

 

[Mwsinron]

Pay 50 or so for Comcast. I cant get dsl and frankly the wife and I like to game. I will never go back to dial up!! NEVER!!

 

[Outtahere]

This is really a sore point with me. I can get dial up or I can get Comcast High Speed at $50 a month. Even though I live in the big city I am too far away for DSL and there is no competing broadband company in my area.

Every month I feel like they have a gun to my head. (They act like it too)

I'm in the same situation, no DSL access so it's a choice of the above two for me. I need the cable speed for work, they pay for it right now but I'm figuring the cost into my budget because I can't go back to dial up.

 

[BUM]

This is (another) of my pet peeves. The high cost is one thing but the phone/cable companies are screwing us all. The USA now ranks something like 9 or 10 worldwide in cost/bandwidth. We're not paying that much more on average but the service is much slower and now the phone companies want us to pay for the expansion and they also want to control the content.

Vote to keep the net neutral.


http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/index.html

 

[lem1955]

This is another high cost of living rural. We pay $49.95/mo for satellite DSL (Wildblue). It's really our only choice for high speed right now, though there's a lot of talk in the VT legislature about "affordable broadband for all".

 

[Sarah in SC]

This is another high cost of living rural. We pay $49.95/mo for satellite DSL (Wildblue). It's really our only choice for high speed right now, though there's a lot of talk in the VT legislature about "affordable broadband for all".

Or not...we have dial up at home at $9.95 a month. Maybe cable will be coming our way sometime soon, but we could never put down $50 a month for internet access! Yikes! Part of living rural is going outside and staying off the computer (heck, that's what the workday is for, surfing the net)!

Sarah

 

[scrinch]

We pay Earthlink $40/mo for 1.5 Mbps DSL service. I've just bought a domain name for family e-mail so that we can shop ISP's without having to change e-mail addresses in the future. I plan on switching to AT&T-Yahoo 3 Mbps DSL service this summer after my wife has finished her school volunteer work for the year and feels comfortable changing her e-mail address. The 3 Mbps service will be $25/mo.

 

[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