Time Warner recently free-upgraded me to 200/25 internet (from my 30/5 “Extreme” Plan) in response to Google Fiber dropping in Raleigh. They get surprisingly close sometimes (as below), but on the flipside, I still get Youtube, Twitch, and Netflix buffering hell some weeknights.
That is… unbelievable.
DennyA, is your upload really slow? I can’t seem to see your speed image. :p
I got the free upgrade here in Charlotte as well, from 15/1 to 50/5. It’s generally running really great, but once or twice a day something happens to the signal and my modem drops into some sort of fallback mode which brings me down to 1-2Mb download. Sometimes it corrects itself after a few minutes, but a lot of times I need to reboot my modem, which fixes it right away. I’m probably going to call in a tech soon.
Anyway, check your download speeds if you catch Youtube buffering to make sure something similar didn’t happen. When things are working, Youtube gets moving pretty quickly and keeps up really well.
Its good to know that Frontier is absolutely terrible everywhere, not just in my area.
CenturyLink started offering gigabit fiber in my neighborhood here in Seattle. And it only took me six weeks to regret getting it.
The day the line was installed I came home, took one look at it and said to myself, that’s installed way too low. It crosses an alley frequented every Tuesday by trash pickup vehicles. Hanging a good two or three feet below any other line. Kind of surprised it took this long, but I was home and got to see the yard waste truck rip the line off the pole, draping it across driveways and a tree all the way down the sidewalk to the end of the block.
CenturyLink’s response was to set up an appointment to fix it in more than three weeks time. Super dumb. I’ve called back a couple times to try and escalate the issue, but that hasn’t gone anywhere - it took me a half-hour to convince a guy the line wasn’t connected to the house anymore. Kept having me reset the modem, the jackass.
I figure come Monday I’ll start calling the number to cancel my service and if they can’t sort it out then it’s back to Comcast, I guess. CenturyLink makes Comcast look like the pinnacle of service and competence.
Finally got rid of my 12/.7 DSL and upgraded to 110/5 cable. Oh wow. What an amazing difference.
Yeah, fiber to the node isn’t that great. (Though it certainly sounds like an improvement over your current situation.) That’s what Centurylink is advertising as “fiber optic internet” around here when it’s really just DSL with a slightly higher maximum. I think I was getting maybe 30 mbps, which isn’t very impressive compared to Comcast’s offerings.
Both our main parties are fucking stupid. It’s only a matter of time, we are going to have to upgrade our infrastructure sooner or later. Later means it will cost more. The Liberals were idiots for fucking with the NBN plan Labor had put in place. Maybe it was going to cost more and take longer, but FTTH where possible is the right technology. Doing it with a mix of old and new technologies is stop-gap that will ultimately have higher operating costs, need further upgrade sooner and lead to disadvantaging some of the populace due to local (literally across the street/suburb) disparity of service. There is of course a case for wireless technologies and it was always going to serve a lot of our rural areas, but we still need to eventually do something with the 50 year old copper in the ground. The whole debacle is just a sad joke.
Meanwhile they release papers and harp on about digital transformation, instantiating a dedicated federal agency to advocate the use of digital technologies to improve government service, but they can’t get a fucking bi-partisan approach to one of the most important national infrastructure upgrades we’ll see in our lifetime.
Meanwhile in America we’ve handed the whole thing to privately owned companies with a vested interest in charging as much as possible while doing as little to improve or expand service as possible and actively and deliberately degrading the quality of service so that they can try to preserve their antiquated media business as long as possible. I don’t know enough about Australian internet to say for sure whether things are actually worse here, but it’s still a remarkably shitty approach.
Don’t forget bribing local governments to pass laws preventing any competition!
That’s my favorite.
In America we value our freedom to bribe, thank you very much.
Yeah, fiber to the node isn’t that great. (Though it certainly sounds like an improvement over your current situation.)
It depends on the alternative. In the UK, where cable is nowhere near as widespread as in the US, and is just not available to lots of the public (eg my apartment building, or most people in rented accommodation), FTTC (as it’s called here) is an order of magnitude better than the alternative for many people. The best DSL is in the 24Mbps range, and few places outside London get that. Even in London, at my current place I was on 7Mbps until I went FTTP/FTTH.
That said, I’m skeptical that the increased cost of FTTC/FTTN in Australia is really more than it would have cost to implement FTTP/FTTH. Even here, a much more densely populated country with not a lot of suburban sprawl, FTTH is only available in either new build or apartment buildings. Doesn’t mean the investment shouldn’t have been made, but it beggars belief that it would have been cheaper.
I am so luck to have Fiber to the Home here in Adelaide, SA. We were on ADSL with 1.2/.7 before the NBN rolled out. Sad thing is we will be moving house later in the year. It’s going to be tough switching to 1990’s speeds.
The 155/30 is offered where I live now, and I signed up for $4 less after taxes than I was paying for the 110/20.
Upload isn’t near 30 , but I am very happy with the download speed. :D
Its amazing how quickly speeds have improved in my area, 4 years ago I was on 3Mb DSL. And I live near cows and a christmas tree farm, there are like no people here that would use this speed, heh.
Ran another test now that I have a better router and upgraded PC on my 155/30. Interesting to see the extra speed I am getting on the download side, upload still isn’t as advertised.
Looking back in this thread, @Editer did you ever get faster internet? Or is your ISP still a potato with foil antenna? ;)
Geez, krok. [sends hugs, via snail mail].
Interesting that your 2.00 MB/s down and 0.12 up is considered a Grade: B
Sending hugs anyway. You might need them, KK.
No, the local cable company (Wave) finally addressed their reliability issues somewhat, and added faster tiers, so I jumped over to them from Frontier DSL and went from about 11 Mbs to 80 Mbs, and then a couple of months later to 250 Mbs down/10 up. I now feel like I’m living in the future!
Paying through the nose, though. About $100/month and that’s just for Internet, no phone or TV. (I think local channels are included, but I get those OTA without compression so the TV’s not hooked to cable.)
Have you looked at Earthlink for broadband? It’s like $45 promotional for 100/10 and 50 after that in Raleigh. Usually I only get about 85-90, but that’s because Charter is scum (it uses Charter network though Charter only gets cost from Earthlink)