Internet speed

If they actually deliver that, and you never EVER need to interact with their service department, that sounds pretty sweet. My experience has been that they lie like a rug about what you actually get from them and have completely nightmarish customer service, but your region might vary. (Also, to be fair, they don’t even offer gigabit to my location, and their regular DSL is of course terrible, as DSL tends to be.)

I agree, it sounds too good to be true, especially the free modem. Isn’t it sad how cynical we’ve become about ISP’s?

Thanks all. I do worry about about the “speeds UP TO” portion, but even then - for the price, 200mpbs would still be a win. I have read that their ‘modems’ (fiber apparently is really just a router) suck, but…

I just need to give them a call and find out how involved the install would be. Based on my wifi map, all the neighbors in my area are already on CenturyLink, so I assume it is just running the fiber to the house from the box sitting in the corner of our lot. Not sure about getting it from outside to the inside though.

I would be careful with CenturyLink. They have a pretty poor reputation here (in Oregon). I haven’t used them myself, though.

I exaggerate, they often work fine, but the problem with third party ISPs is:

“We apologize for placing you on hold for 87 minutes. It looks like we need to send a tech out. They’re only available 9 days from now, and the service window is 6:40AM to 9:40PM. We will send you a text 10 minutes before arriving.”

The only people I know with CenturyLink are the ones that can’t actually get Charter, cable. It’s DSL, slooow, and here also spendy and still requires a landline, I’m told.

Yeah, if it wasn’t fiber/gigabit, I wouldn’t even consider it. Heck, if Cox would just give me my current 150Mpbs plan for $60/mo, I probably wouldn’t switch just to save the hassle.

There must be some MBA course out there that tells these companies to screw over your existing customers, put zero effort into retention, and just focus on new customers. If my cable company offered prices that orbited Earth, I’d probably still have TV with them.

Unpopular opinion - having a Gb connection is cool in theory, but in practice there isn’t much difference (in terms of day to day use) between it and say a 100Mb connection, really. I have two teenagers in the house that are constantly watching Netflix and/or gaming (and sometimes online homework) plus I’m streaming something most of the time as well, so from that point of view it’s nice to have a big pipe, but we never need it. Since upgrading from the 100Mb connection, no one has been like “ooh my Call of Duty sessions are so crazy awesome now” or “wow, look at how much crisper this episode of Daredevil looks” or anything, after all.

Even downloading something big, like a 23GB installation in 12 minutes is really awesome but honestly, how often do most people pull down big games AND need to play them withing 15 minutes vs… 90 minutes? Even for me, and I bounce around between games a fair bit and don’t keep games archived (I just re-download stuff on a whim, it’s not that big of a difference.

I only have Gb internet because my ISP gives a 6TB data cap at this tier, and between me and my son (and all the streaming content) we were routinely coming very close to the 1TB cap and I was tired of keeping a watchful eye on it at the end of every month. Also, going to Gig internet, if I took their dumb land line bundle, was somehow cheaper than what I was paying, and no contract or other fees (I’m paying the most you can pay right now, lol, but it’s still cheaper because I dropped stuff like Starz). So it’s working out well, and from that point of view @Daagar you may be looking at a great option. But like I said, except for an expanded data cap, you probably won’t truly notice much difference. (Well, obviously if it’s cheaper, you’ll notice that as well but see my last paragraph for an important caveat.)

However, my ISP is terrible about support. Oh, they try hard, don’t get me wrong, but I’m at the end of the line out here for them, and it takes up to two weeks to have a tech come out and look at something sometimes. They only come out this way two days a week, so only if a cancellation comes up can I get in earlier. So something to bear in mind with your option is the ISP’s response to if something goes down or your speed drops due to line noise if a piece of equipment on the poles needs to be restarted or something.

Agreed, this is about price more than performance. Like I said, if Cox would give me ~100mpbs for $60/mo, I’d stay put. Fully understood about support - but that’s really hard to judge until after the fact. Online, there are just as many complaints about Cox as there are CenturyLink (depsite having no personal problems with Cox myself). But I’m cheap, so a $40/mo savings is… outweighing all else at the moment.

It’s not a huge lifechanging moment, but little quality of life improvements are nice, like basically nobody ever seeing blocky/low-res streams even though we’re all watching stuff on different devices at the same time.

It’s nice that I can download and play a game within an hour while my coworkers have to start the download hours earlier or even overnight.

Gigabit internet is so choice. If you have the means, I highly suggest picking it up.

I have an unlimited space Google Drive that I essentially use as a NAS. It’s just as fast as local storage in continuous access, but very slow on random access, so I don’t like, install games there. It’s great for backups and media.

Service is definitely a regional thing as much as anything else. I just have nothing good to say about CenturyLink in either the Twin Cities or Des Moines (my grandparents used them for a bit), so I would recommend being very leery about your area.

LOL well, that’s as may be but I honestly think when the kids move out in a few years and aren’t hogging up my bandwidth I will probably drop down the local utilities as my ISP, they offer a 50Mb package for $30 a month that has no caps and they are local, so if I have an issue they can come out that afternoon. I like that idea a great deal. It sounds like they are also working on upgrading their infrastructure so they might be able to offer even more in the coming years.

Re CenturyLink: I had their DSL years ago but it was 1.5 Mbit. Fine for what it was - don’t recall outages or ever needing a service call.

And @Scotch_Lufkin is right: 1 Gbit is rarely useful for most people. I used it a couple days ago to download 153 games (~284 GB installed size) via Gog Galaxy but that’s a one-off that’s unlikely to repeat.

If in-application bandwidth measurements are accurate Alan Wake’s American Nightmare just downloaded via Gog at peak 103 Mbytes/s with sustained at 80ish. Then Steam grabbed the same game which (again, in-app bandwidth measuring) peaked at 64 Mbytes/s with sustained in the 30s. Both apps downloaded and installed it in a minute or less.

So that’s what 1 Gbit is good for.

That, and posting pics like this:

It was a bad day today. Packet loss to my local Comcast Gateway was 20% +. I couldn’t even open a chat window with Comcast, but fortunately later in the day the signal got good enough that I was able to get connected with Comcast. Dude said he could totally fix my problem. I laughed.

But he was right. He reset my modem and it was fixed. How the fuck does this happen? Surely they must have done something on their side to cause the issue, right?

Aaand the problem is back. Fuck Comcast.

Edit - resetting my cable modem fixed it for ~25 minutes. And it came back, again.

Resetting my modem for a second time and it’s not fixing it.

So, bad cable modem or incorrect provisioning on Comcast part?

Sounds like you’re gonna have to call a guy.

Could be, but seems unlikely. It’s two months old, and during that time it’s been operating fine over 90% of the time and the problem will sometimes fix itself. On both Friday and Saturday night the problem went away after ~11:30pm.

I got a guy coming Monday. I’m not optimistic, though.