Looking for a new ISP

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bob

2[H]4U
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Feb 13, 2002
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After qwest had sent me the modem and set me up for the 7mb/896k DSL... It didnt work. It took 4 phone calls to tech support over 3 days before someone finnaly called me back to say that DSL actually isnt avalible in my area. RMA'ing the modem back to them at no cost to me, so I guess I cant complain.

Comcast cable is avalible. Other options include Dial-up, and satellite internet.
Ive said it once before, but my two experiances with Cable internet, I was not impressed. The download speeds were all over the place during the day, and the upload was far too low,all for nearly $60.00 a month.

512/128k for wild-blue, 49.95 a month... No
$8.99 for dialup... Uploading several gigabytes of videos could take decades... No.
Comcast "Up to 4x faster than 1.5Mb dsl" cable internet, 8000768k... $67.00+ per month... Maybe. 6000/384 is 57.00 per month.

Is there anyone with here, using Comcast cable, able to comment? I was really hoping to continue with using my crapper server box, connecting me and a few friends houses together to do CS over VPN. I dont know if comcast is reliable enough, or if I will get anywhere near the speeds that they advertise..
 
Too bad you don't get FIOS. :(

I use Comcast, since I really have no choice around my neck of the woods. 4 Mbps down/384 kbps up for $43 a month. Considering the topology of cable (tree and branch) you can have either really good speeds of hit-or-miss speeds since the bandwidth is shared with people on your branch of the network, and considering I live in a pretty 'sticksville' area, I get my 4 Mbps/384 kbps at max speed at almost all times throughout the day.

But I've generally had a good overall level of service with Comcast here, but the quality of service varies greatly from place to place.
 
0 problems with comcast over a 4 or 5 year period

I say go with them.

sure they have their share of DNS issues every so many months, but that is something you have to expect from any home ISP with no sort of service level agreement.

problem to me would be them denying there's an issue, not fixing it within 24 hours and generally treating customers like crap, personally I have not seen that with comcast and they always get on any issues that come up ASAP.
 
I am pretty happy with Comcast as well. They let me run a server as well so that is something that would keep me from switching to say FIOS if it was available in my neighborhood.
 
Comcast is hit or miss. They're generally a mediocre service (in Philly) with absolutely horrible customer service. As soon as you get it, switch your DNS to 4.4.4.0 or another public, reliable service.


...I've boycotted Comcast ever since they slaughtered TechTV into a bloody pulp, threw the pulp into a nuclear reactor, and blew it up into incomprehensible pieces within a few months. :eek:
 
Well... I have it now. 29.95 for 6 months, for 4/384k. After that, its going to be ~50ish, which when I will probably cancell and get dialup.

With nothing running, the ping to google was 60ms, everything was fairly snappy. Similar to my experiance on T3. Click, and its loaded. I now have something running, 10 connections, downloading at 30-70KBps (website archiver). Ping times have shot up to mid-300ms, and loading the hardfourm was giving me flashbacks to dialup.

Fast service with only a mild load, overpriced... but I suppose its better than dialup in one way, bandwidth. Dialup has lower pings than this, though not under this kind of load... I Dont ever remember seeing pings easily go up so far on dsl.

Should this increase in pings with only 10 connections, 7KBps per connection... is it normal to see the ping increase by 6x?

Edit : See for yourself

I also have a large file uploading, though its humming along at ~15-20KBps, or using about half of my avalible upload.

Edit #2: Strange, now the ping is back down to mid-60's... and this is only minutes later... I give up.
 
If you saturate any pipe the latency will increase, unless you do something to prioritize certain packets (QoS or packet queueing router) and then whatever you had saturating the pipe will get slowed down.

EDIT: ok, since it's back down I should add I forgot to mention routing issues can also cause latency to specific sites while leaving others uneffected, I would suggest using traceroute (or tracert for some Windows version), this will give you an idea where the latency is actually coming from (end point or a router in between, or even you)

BTW the HardForum has been slow for me for a couple days.
 
Xipher said:
If you saturate any pipe the latency will increase
Click to expand...

Yeah... of course. That would be true if I had 'saturated' my connection. The load I had, wasnt anywhere near what I would consider saturated. I dont understand how it can go from 60 to 300-600ms just by using half of the avalible upload, and about 1/10th of the download. I will try the traceroute and leave it going for a few days, It might even be issues with my computer.
 
Sorry, I must have seen the period in the wrong spot on that screenshot.
 
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