Your ISP Choices?

One man's way of saying bye to Hughesnet.

At one time we had Crapcast but they were so unreliable and hard to deal with I went back to dialup for a while. At the time I was still teaching online via E-mail and could not be just dropping off for three days at a time.

When Verizon offered DSL I jumped at that and they were pretty good. Later they sold our service area to Frontier Communications and they have also been pretty good to deal with. The only other alternative is dish. We still have Crapcast for TV only because DW wants it.

Crapcast is so bad that they have a special 800# for friends & family of employees. DW's nephew works for them and I was about to cancel service and she called him, he gave us the number and a code. The call was answered promptly, no telephone tree, and the people I talked to were all friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable. Service tech was here the next day as promised, when promised.

So they can do it when they really want to. But most of the time they don't want to be bothered.

ls99 said:

One man's way of saying bye to Hughesnet.

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When he grinds it into the dirt...a nice touch!

sengsational said:

When he grinds it into the dirt...a nice touch!

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+1
I loved that move. Let's you know his frustration level!

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We have Comcast - bundle of TV, internet, phone. We have a few horror stories of our own, mainly about getting the phone to work. It seems that the 800' feed to our house is a challenge for them. But it has been very reliable the past year. I checked into AT&T, but we can't get U-verse in our area.

imoldernu said:

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Reviews and ratings here:
Internet Services

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Wow, just looked at the chart and all the providers have between 0 and ~1.25 (out of 5) stars. I guess all the providers are bad, but I did not take the time to read the actual reviews.

Anyway, I have Verizon FIOS where I am renting, and for 10 years where I lived before I moved last summer. Quality of Service is VG (IMO). Customer Service is VG (IMO) Price is on the high side (IMO).

Only viable wired service is local ma&pa telco, with high dollar DSL bundled with an expensive landline as part of the deal. There is one wireless provider advertising availability, but I know where their antennas are and topographical obstructions make that impractical. Several cell providers offer back shelf home internet services, and I've run several cost scenarios to see if going all in with a cell phone/home internet package would be viable, perhaps if they one day offer a great deal with mega bandwidth I'd bite, but not at today's prices - and they've been throwing some pretty attractive deals out lately. Wireless, satellite, & cell plans for the most part don’t offer the bandwidth I want and their monthly data caps are too restrictive.

Cheaper alternative nearby is a major cable company, but their service only extends to about a 1/2 mile down the road. They were not interested in extending their infrastructure to our location but I was able to convince them to "allow me" to have internet only service initiated in a willing friend's garage, which was inside their service area. That was the biggest challenge, and would never have happened except for the help of a high level customer relations team. That team was unfortunately disbanded a few months later, but not until after I had my service installed. I set up my own wireless link from the friend's garage to my 37' tower which also supports my OTA TV antenna. I’ve been using that equipment for three years now and am satisfied with the service, although I do lose some bandwidth due to less than optimum LOS on the link route, but it is still faster and cheaper than the telco's service.

So my provider is a hybrid cable and customer provided last mile approach.

Not a 'major' supplier, I had Earthlink for dial up for many years and went with their DSL service many years back. I have to rate them pretty good. Occasional random outage. I understand they sub the interface to COVAD.I get 5MPS and the rate was raised from $40 to $45 last month. We have Direct dish TV, pretty happy with that. I ponder Uverse or cable for internet access but will wait until fiber is available before changing from a system that works well enough for us.

We live about 60 miles outside Chicago. Unincorporated area and get no high speed anything. Our best is wireless usb stick in a cradlepont router. Problem is data caps on wireless planes.

What happened to high speed access for everyone? Comcast wants 12k just to trench to our house (across stream) just so they can bill us monthly?

Something wrong with this picture.

I'm using Hughsnet. No cell at my present location but maybe next year when I move to the top of the hill. Skype has been working pretty good for phone service lately. I couldn't use an IP phone for several months. Hughs' answer was "not our problem". It was their problem and they finally got it fixed. The internet is OK unless you want to do something more demanding than keeping up with the FIRE board. It is also very expensive for what you get, but my only option for communication.

I am looking forward to google fiber:

We use Comcast with Verizon FIOS as an alternative. Our speed is about 50 Mbps and no real complaints except having to renegotiate the package price every couple of years when the "deal" terms are up.


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