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PC World's ISP Service Rankings, as of June 2005
Ant writes "Broadband Reports reports a PC World article on the best and worst Internet Service Providers (ISPs). More than 6,000 PC World readers rated major providers for its speed, technical support, and more. The article also reveals which broadband and dial-up services make the grade and which fall flat."
Cox Communications (Southern California): 5 (Horrible support, could-be-faster speeds, and lame port filters)
Scott Swezey
...but beware. I was promised incredible speeds, only to find out that getting 40kb/sec is pretty much my max.
I rate them a 9, only because I think the cost is a bit high. But, service is exceptional and reliable.
Why I like them:
- 6 megabit/sec downstream (effective rates peaks out at about 4.5 M/sec)
- 768K upstream (effective rate about 650K/sec)
- Techie-friendly TOS: I'm allowed to run servers: game, email, web, etc.
- Static IP (extra ones are inexpensive)
- Speakeasy will configure their DNS to return the FQDN of your choice when doing a reverse lookup on your IP.
- Unix shell account, if you want it.
- Share your connection with your neighbor, if you don't charge your neighbor anything.
- If you DO want to charge for sharing, Speakeasy will collect the amount that you specifiy from your neighbor, and credit part of it to your bill.
One thing I wish they would reconsider: they now offer VoIP service that uses their network. But, they will only assign a phone number from my area code. I'd switch from Vonage, if they would match Vonage's ability to assign me a number in my employer's city, rather than mine.I'd say Charter isn't too good.
They messed up our cable, so in the winter, whenever the sun would go down, it would get cold and we would get no signal.
They finally cranked up the signal, but then in the early summer/late spring, the moment the sun would get up in the sky and it would get warm, the signal would cut out because it was too hot.
Also, every time we call in, they ask if we have a router. Of course we do, so we say we do. They tell us that it's the router's fault, before we even explain what's going on. This may be standard ISP practice, but it's still ridiculous.
If we need someone to come out for a service call, and call on a Monday, they'll tell us they'll have someone out here by Thursday. Only problem with that is, no one is home, with both parents working and both kids at school. They won't fix anything without talking to the people who called in, so they always show up when we're gone, and then tell us they'll come back again sometime, but don't tell us when.
I'd say they get around a 7. When it works, it works well, but when it doesn't work, it's a really ridiculous process to get it fixed.
speakeasy, 9.5. Doubled my speed 2 years ago, there's no waiting time when you call tech support, 8 free email accounts, webspace/ssh access on one of their servers. The also contact their customers immediately if they notice a pc on their network infected with spyware (of the port scanning and/or pinging variety), and provide step by step instructions to get rid of it.
Yeah, they're a bit more expensive, but truthfully, I have no problem paying a bit more for the superior tech support I've received from them.
SBC -- 3
Lately they've been pretty reliable here, but about a year ago there were problems with "area outages" about once a week at work. Whenever somebody complained that the Internet was broken, I took a look at things, figured out that the problem wasn't on my end and said we just had to wait until SBC fixed things on their end. One day, somebody decided to call support. What could be the harm? Well, I warned him not to, but he wouldn't listen. He called and got someone calling himself Richard with a thick Indian accent who told my coworker to do a variety of things, some that I had already done and others that made absolutely no sense. About a half hour into this, he asked Richard if the problem could be on the SBC side of things. He said all his monitors showed green, whatever that means. After another two hours of trying things as stupid as pinging yahoo when there isn't an Internet connection (which of course didn't work, but he must've done it dozens of times), the call was escalated to the next tier of support. This person could be understood, she gave some basic instructions that had already been tried, but after a couple minutes said she had run some tests and thinks it's an SBC problem. The call was sent to maintenance which said immediately that it's an area outage and gave an estimate as to when the problem would be fixed and a number we could call to get back to maintenance. A couple hours later, the problem was indeed fixed, but Richard's instructions resulted in the network settings on the computer being completely screwed up (about 45 minutes wasted figuring out what had been changed and putting things right) and on top of that, Richard had changed the account password and not told us what the new one is so I had to call maintenance back and get the password reset.
More recently, they've started to block access to port 25 on servers not on a small whitelist that they won't add the mail server I use to. (I don't have access to it, so I can't just use another port. I understand the reasoning behind blocking port 25, but it's still evil.)
Reps were continually calling trying to upsell, sometimes to what I already had (yes, I already have that service. Shouldn't you know what I'm already buying from you before you call me?).
Two things are keeping the score above minimum. The price continues to go down (or rather, the speed keeps going up with no increase in price), but I'm keeping an eye on the bill just in case they try to jack up the rates without warning (or provide warning in tiny print) and lately the service has remained uninterrupted for quite some time.
Remember RFC 873!
Don't forget excellent customer service.
I've never had anything but top-notch customer service from them. It's their number one selling point as far as I'm concerned.
Depending on where you live and everything, DSL isn't as good as cable. In my neighborhood, all the gamers are on the DSL 29 hours a day so when I used to have it I couldn't do what I wanted fast enough. Cable works a lot better. I use Cox, I'd rate their customer service around a -43819703471085, but their service is pretty reliable, around a 7-8.
That's the pro. Cons are obvious and widespread.
- CV caps - if you upload for over an hour straight, there's a decent chance they'll limit your rate to 150k (small k) up. That kills your download rate naturally. Even better, they won't even tell you about it, so if you're wondering all of a sudden why your speeds suck, you have to phone customer support, and then they get an "engineer" to phone you back 24 hours later, re-read the ToS, make sure you agree to them, and remove the cap. It's a total pain in the ass.
- Email sucks. It's common to get errors trying to send mail. Incoming mail bounces frequently. Mail's disappeared completely before. There's a stupid virus scanner that you can't turn off, so if you subscribe to groups like Bugtraq, expect to only be able to read about 75% of posts.
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Newsgroup access sucks worse than email, although it's not quite as bad as it was. It's limited to ~120K download, and for years, the retention was about 2 days. Timeouts are common.
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They block ports. 80's blocked, as is 25, for the obvious ones.
Stability's not bad. My IP address changes once a year, maybe. But that's just network connection. Actually trying to do anything with it (see email/NG) can result in problems.Pricewise, it's $50/month if you don't have cable TV through them, and $45 otherwise. Used to be cheaper, but it's crept up over the last few years.
Customer service is generally clueless. I emailed them when I was having intermittent trouble accessing sites. Figured out a couple minutes later that one of their nameservers had died. TWO WEEKS LATER, I got a reply telling me to unplug the modem and reboot my computer, which of course would have done nothing.
As soon as FIOS comes into my area (should be this year sometime), I'm bailing. I hate Verizon, but not as much as Cablevision.
Haida Manga
Go to ADSLguide.
Wanted : A Signature.
I don't know what magic powder Earthlink's slipping into their monthly bills, but their customers must be high.
Earthlink scored an 87 in the download speed category, significantly higher than Road Runner's 81, and Cox's 76. Which is a little bit funny, because Earthlink doesn't actually provide network services to their cable customers -- Earthlink customers with Cox or Time Warner cable coming into their home get the exact same data service as Cox and Road Runner subscribers. (Earthlink does set their own price, and offers their own "extra features" -- but those don't affect upload speeds.)
The results here have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Aside from DNS servers yo-yoing up and down for weeks, a central office screwup that destroyed any packets over a few hundred bytes, a string of chronic service outages, some incoming email blocks that don't correspond to any known spam blacklist, and tech support which is clueless, incompetent, deaf, rude and outright dishonest, I've been happy with Verizon DSL.
All the network problems were last year, to be fair.
In Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada... over the past 5 years I have tried all 3 broadband ISP's available.
Videon (now Shaw) is a cable ISP: Speeds of 600KB/sec (kilobytes) are common on their ~5mbit (megabit) connection for roughly $40 a month. Reliability remains poor. At best you'll have 90% uptime each month. At worst 2 weeks no internet 1 week with internet. (At which point I canceled my account and never looked back). Shaw offers a free static IP based on current MAC address, however they limit monthly transfers to 50GB, anything downloaded over 50GB you may be subject to fees. Their TOS is very anti sharing.
Skyweb is a Satellite internet ISP. Uptime is poor, speeds are marginal. I stuck with them roughly one month, due to a rain storm causing massive downtime.
Finally, MTS is a DSL based ISP. Their speeds are competitive. Price is fair, roughly $45 a month. Uptime is 100% every month, unless they are doing maintenance which will lower uptime to 99.9% reliability. Speeds currently are 3mbit down. They are friendly with server hosting, however IP's are dynamic.
Because reliability is the only thing that matters to me:
Shaw receives 0/10
Skyweb 1/10
MTS 10/10
Dollar Highway Financial News
It's here, but, no, I wouldn't expect a person to just stumble upon it. I had to go through two levels of tech support people (yelling all the way) before one finally admitted they were blocking port 25 at all.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Might do well to check this page
http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/results2004.htm
not sure if its the latest tho
I bet you're using the 4.x.x.x DNS... avoid those like the plague. There's two old-school caching farms at 206.124.64.253 and 206.124.65.253 (from the GTE.net company) that are fast, fast, fast, and never down.