Deck again - county screwed me.

[Frank]

I let Verizon replace the old copper with fiber a few years ago when I had 2 land lines. Since switched one to Comcast triple play but maintain the other for business and bill it out entirely to my main consulting client. What is annoying is that they bill the phone like the old land line charging extra for caller id, etc and need for long distance carrier. Having done battle with old AT&T years ago I use MCI long distance and whole thing costs $37/month which is outrageous with modern technology. The little calling I do could be handled by my Tracfone which costs me $150 for 2 years.

Cable on our street is underground as are all services. It was totally replaced a couple of years ago. FIOS and Comcast cut each others lines accidentally a few times. Comical at times with FIOS as all their diggers were obviously illegal subs and made numerous mistakes putting fiber to wrong side of the house, then when installers arrived, meandering a trench across my front yard maybe 6 inches deep. Good thing I don't need to do any more planting there ;)

[Cindy Hamilton]

Actually, Comcast is more reliable than DSL around here. DSL went out every thunderstorm and we had to call the telco to reboot it. Sometimes they'd have to come out to the house and fiddle around with the NID. It could be days without Internet for us.

Cindy Hamilton

[gfretwell]

I understand there is no free lunch but when I am looking at a $160 satellite bill, there is a lot of cash in there to buy HBO, Sho and maybe some other services. We already have Netflix and Prime. With the different packages available I should be able to fine tune what I pay for to be closer than the shotgun bundles the Cable/Sat companies throw at us. I suspect more content producers will be taking money straight from the consumer and cutting these bundlers out completely. That will be where the lack of net neutrality will raise it's ugly head if you get your internet from a company that also sells content. A "slow" DSL may end up being a lot faster than the 100mb cable service on things they don't sell.

[gfretwell]

Salty snow?

[gfretwell]

That is always going to be a local thing. My neighbor is a Comcast guy and he says they just will not fork over the money to upgrade the physical plant that was here when this was "South Florida Cable", 3 companies ago. They say it is "good enough" and with no competition that really means "as good as it is going to get".

[Tekkie®]

[e-mail] posted for all of us...

Comblast sucks EVERYWHERE. I would sure like to get a bonus for the year...

[notbob]

Yep. Ferget 'free'.

I heard, awhile back, that providers that once gave free airtime (NBC, CBS, ABC) cannot charge fer the same services, but they do. For instance, you get NBC news free (well, w/ commercials), but other programming (sitcomes, sports, etc) costs actual $$$$! Like I sed, even PBS is now charging $$. 8|

nb

[Clare Snyder]

No, it is far enough from the road to avoid the salt from the roads, and I don't generally salt my deck or porch

[Terry Coombs]

  I guess we're among the fortunate few . Our phone and internet is through a local/regional monopoly and their rates are competitive and their service is great . We're 12 miles from town with a 6Mb/756k connection and basic telephone for under a hundred a month . Very seldom have an interruption - I know at least the service coming into town is fiber optic , not sure about the distribution network .   Just tested (Ookla), got 6.79Mb down and .82 up - while streaming a TV program over the Roku too .   --   Snag

[Ed Pawlowski]

We have the opposite. The DSL never went out but cable would go out if the temperature is below 68 or over 72 degrees or humidity above 50%.

[Ron]

Both AT&T U-Verse and Comcast HSI are reliable but Comcast's service is 20x faster.

The fastest U-Verse speed offered in my neighborhood was 6Mb down and 1 Mb up while my Comcast line clocked in at 124Mb down and 24Mb up.

[gfretwell]

At a certain point that is just gee whiz info because the content prover may not be anywhere close to that fast. I know when I am getting stuff from my news server it is nowhere near the rate my DSL will run and I can load 2 streams at the same time on different instances of agent and it does not slow down either of them.

[Ron]

IIRC, the 6Mb/1Mb plan from AT&T is $51/month.

For $47 I can get the 60Mb/5Mb plan from Comcast.

Why would I want reward AT&T for installing crappy slow internet in my area?

[gfretwell]

I can't speak for ATT, I have Century link but when Comcast is down, the data rate is ZERO and it is down a lot here. I was online and sending my family updates when the eye of Irma went over my house. Comcast still had their hard line laying in a pile by the side of the road 10 days later.