[lug] ISP advice

[Collins Richey]

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 12:00 PM, George Sexton <georges at mhsoftware.com> wrote:
> I’ve got Comcast and I have to say their service isn’t markedly worse than
> anyone else’s. It’s pretty fast.
>

I've had the equivalent Comcast service since the ATT @HOME days, and
the results have always been very good. There were times a few years
ago when their DNS servers were not reliable, but I haven't noticed
that in the past couple of years.

The one caveat with Comcast is this: which local area? I'm on the
original well-built ATT portion of the network (SE Aurora). Comcast
underbuilt and oversubscribed some of the newer areas resulting in
poor performance when every connection was active. The only direct
reports I had of this behavior were from the area around the
University Blvd / Lincoln area (far south Metro).

Another point. I haven't used most of the ISP services for the past 8
years. All of my email (including my wife's) is forwarded to gmail,
and thus I can't comment much about their current email services. It
has improved recently, but the lag in sending an email at one point
was up to 10 minutes before it appeared at the sender (both ends on
Comcast and gmail).

I've never measured the speeds. Comcast upgraded my service a year or
so ago. It's always darn fast for downloads. In all the years I've
only experienced about 3 outages, relatively brief in duration, except
when @HOME bailed out as the ATT ISP without warning. (That has
nothing to do with Comcast).

Another thought. Quest/Whatever-they-are-now have been building out a
fiber network for the past few years. If you are in one of those
areas, you would certainly get excellent reults.

We also have Comcast as the land-line provider, and that service is excellent.

I hope this helps,

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.