The Observation Deck

Mark--- If you're experiencing so much trouble with the line------
Howcum yer able to post here so easy

Joan.

Yup, I have the low end service. This am: 300/720. For $60 I could opt for the 6mb/sec high end. Twenty times faster for two-and-a-half times the cost. They got me. Japan? 30mb.sec for $35. I'm not holding my breath. It's a racket and the US is a technological generation behind first world Asia in high speed deployment.

How silly of us--the competition driven 'free' market driving down prices--LOL.

Adelphia. "Click here to find out about the exciting new Premier High-Speed Internet service!"

Free WiFi in Lakewood: 1-2mb/sec. ...much better...

When I get my new Mac later this year I'll play Adelphia against SBC and-no doubt-end up with DSL for a spell.

***

Anybody want to speedtest their lakewood connections and report here what Cox and DSL and free is adding up to?

I have Cox's highest tier service and am always getting great speed:

OK hotshot Bryan---

Tell the rest of us rubes how you posted the actual graphics

Stan

Stephen Calhoun wrote:Joan.

Yup, I have the low end service. This am: 300/720.

I think you missed the broad middle. Adelphia's "standard" service runs about $42 a month for up to 4 Mbps IF you have cable TV. It's $53 if you don't.
As for the free wi-fi, I admit to being a speed junkie. 1-2 Mpbs sounds like horse and buggy, no matter the cost.
PS---I'm with Stan on marvelling at the graphics insertion.
PPS---I just got 4 Mpbs download from both Speakeasy and bandwithplace.com

It's been intermittant, so when it works, I post and check email etc, and sometimes I get booted offline, then I wait. And wait. And wait.
This a.m. while the service man from yesterday told me someone would be out today to fix the dsl part of the line, the office said "the soonest we can get anyone there is tomorrow".

This leads me to believe, since I'm not on the top of the priority stack after over a week, who is?
Someone has been having more problems than me with their phone line and DSL ?

I forget what level it's called , but when I'm on, but I get 2508/420 on speakeasy.net, or thereabouts. (When it's working). SBC btw.

I'm curious about the graphics too. (Maybe its the Img button).

Joan, thanks for the data.

Adelphia doesn't offer my cable block 4mb. It's 6mb for $60; 10 bucks per megabyte. I'm paying--I think--$24 for (the sake of multiplying!) for 333kbs/sec=$72 per megabyte. There's no resource difference so basically I can triple my cost and gain 18x the speed. It's a racket.

Bryan is geting 1+mb/sec. What are you paying?

Staff connection at library on a T1 shared with lots of other PC's is 2-3mb/sec. Public connection varies with load: 1-2 mb/sec.

***

The 'free market' is, of course, controlled by monopoly providers in our area so we are allowed to pay for premium service ten times slower and almost twice the cost of economic competitors who are a 'generation' ahead of us in both bandwidth and hb services.

The only way to go after this raw monopoly party is free networks because the price is not likely to come down as long as investors insist on short term returns against societal benefit and competitiveness. ...B*astards.

Mr C(Mark)

My friend the former SBC victim got his morning howl when I told him about your post. Seems he had the same experience, as did several others. "With SBC, It's always about the squirrels" he said and proposed that SBC actually stands for "Squirrel-Bashing Charlatans" He finally got fed up and went Cox.

Mr. C (Stephen)

I'm paying $42 for the standard Adelphia high speed internet service, which is billed as up to 4 Mpbs but is usually realistically in the 2.5-3 range. I am also a cable TV subscriber. I'd call the local Adelphia office and ask again if they're SURE your only options are slow and super fast. That middle service is their bread-and-butter package. If they're not offering that to ALL customers, they're crazy.

Stephen: I've got Cox's 9/1 plan and I currently pay I think $49.99/ month. Their 4/512 plan is $39.99 but I've heard that will be bumped to 6/512 or 6/768 in the near future for the same cost (it's already happened in some markets).

As for posting the picture I used the IMG button above and linked the screenshot I took from my Flickr account.

I was with APK, an excellent local company, when they started offering DSL. They had a lot of trouble getting it to work for me, some of which was due to coordinating, but most of which was due to the phone company's unfamiliarity with the service, and their hodgepodge network, where apparently some lines went through suitable switches, and some didn't. At that time, I had two phone lines, and one was suited, but one wasn't. That was a few years ago when the phone company did not offer DSL; I would hope their technological knowledge has improved, now that they themselves are offering DSL.

APK, alas, was sold to a larger company, Eexpedient as I recall, and I continued with them, but eventually their prices rose, and Cox offered me a much better deal, partly because I was already getting some other services from Cox. Cox had some difficulty getting my service working; as soon as the installation tech left, it started going down intermittently. They sent a tech out, and he concluded the problem was that my cable drop was underground, and water was getting into it. He left to see if they would give me a new cable. I got out my shop-vac and sucked all the water out of the underground conduit, but that didn't stop the problem. In a couple of days a more experienced tech showed up, and said the water shouldn't cause a problem, as the cable is waterproof He replaced my "modem" with what he said was a better model, and all problems were resolved.

I'm quite happy with the cox service (telling everyone your new email address when you change is a hassle, as you don't remember who all has it; a good reason to get a web based address) and it almost never goes down.

I was happy with the speed on both DSL and Cox cable (when I test, Cox is always higher than my DSL was) but both are far higher than my old computers can exploit. Its like asking which bullet is faster; I can't see either one. I know the DSL people say that cable speed will go down if too many people in your cluster are on line, but I have not experienced any degradation; I don't know if that is due to Cox, or I just live among non users.

Cox does offer usenet, which is valuable to me as I get a lot of information from newsgroups. They do not, however, have the capacity to add a specific newsgroup, as they just buy the service from a third party. But I've only come across one newsgroup they didn't carry that I wanted to look at, and you can use google, etc., for that. If you haven't used usenet, look into what it offers. Since SBC apparently does not offer it, you would have to subscribe to one of the service that are available, and when I looked at them a couple of years ago the price was $10 or $13 a month,

dl meckes wrote:SBC doesn't offer usenet to its subscribers. As far as I know, Cox still does. This is an important part of my internet experience.

Since when...?

As long as I have been using SBC DSL ... going on 6 years now ... they have... see http://help.sbcglobal.net/article.php?item=287 for the appropriate server information for setting up your newsgroup access if your an sbc subscriber.

Mark Crnolatas wrote:I've had a fairly bad experience with SBC and my DSL and phone, in the last week. It's still not resolved, and after it was supposed to be fixed yesterday, the same problem (random drop off of net connection) occurred again. When I called the tech support this morning, they told me to "watch it until 8am tomorrow".

Why? I just had several days of bad service. So, I ask this:

Has anyone else had good or bad experiences internet with SBC?

How about Internet with Cox Cable?

I just recently went through the big debate...stay with SBC DSL and hope they either offer naked service in the next year, or fiber (not likely for at least a couple more years) or switch to COX for internet only service...
COX would have won, both price-wise and speed wise but... and this is the big but... we'd have to start paying for WIFI access at Caribou and McDonalds, which would have eliminated any financial advantage totally...
(I pay $1.99 a month for SBC Freedomlink as an SBC DSL Customer...)

I'm also not necessarily unhappy with the speeds I'm getting now 1.8mbps down/608 up on average bursting at up to 2.5mbps when I'm lucky (Signed up for the pro package which is rated up to 3mbps) but being a technophile... faster is always better!!

When I last spoke with SBC, they said they did not fully support usenet in that they told me I couldn't access binary newsgroups without doing so through a service like GigaNews.

I'm happy to be corrected on this if they gave me the wrong information.

I see in the TOS that they mention usenet, so there must be some capability to access it.

dl meckes wrote:When I last spoke with SBC, they said they did not fully support usenet in that they told me I couldn't access binary newsgroups without doing so through a service like GigaNews.

I'm happy to be corrected on this if they gave me the wrong information.

I see in the TOS that they mention usenet, so there must be some capability to access it.

Never had a problem with the few binary ng's ive used in the past either... i think its mainly just lazy techsupport reps... however there are from what I understand daily dl/ul limits in place though I've never managed to hit one myself.

Plus i do most of my downloading through bittorrent... its easier than trying to recombine binary chunks...

SBC sucks! What a horrible company.