How much do you hate your ISP

I needed to rant a bit, and i figure there are probably some other people out there that are in the same boat i am in. We currently have time warner internet service at home. I pay for 100mbps down and 5 up. However, over the last month, our service has gotten so bad that 75% of the time, we get page load errors, and the other 25% of the time, we average .75mbps down. I've called them time and time again to try to resolve this, but there is nothing they have done that works. ATT is not much better here. I miss verizon fios... it was the best. I swear, i would even consider moving my apartment to a place with FIOS, but there is none near where we live (which happens to be just a few blocks from work).

How do people deal with crap ISPs?

What ISP do you use and are you happy with it?

/rant

FIos it's the best

I find it quite easy to hate Verizon. Mine slows to a crawl in the wee hours, just when you would expect overall traffic to be decreasing. I'm shopping for something that sucks less but not sure it exists.

i guess the question should- is there an ISP that doesnt suck?

RCN and comcast (surprisingly) have been pretty good to me. Pretty stable speeds for both of them (50 MBps and 105 MBps respectively)

Hawaii TelCom was pretty good, unfortunately my new neighborhood only has Time Warner. And yes they suck here too.

Comcast was the bloody ***** worst! It literally got to the point where I told these guys that "I will be throwing your cable box over the balcony now" to which I hung up and threw their box over the balcony.

I had paperwork, signed paperwork from those idiots quoting me the set pricing and service. They never followed through until I sent their box airborne. They replaced the box and fixed the rates. Temporarily until I moved and then they started again. That was a nightmare. Now I'm with fios which is the lesser of 2 evils

I get great service from Comcast. They used to keep calling and wanting me to upgrade, but when I asked them to take me off their call list, the calls stopped. I think they're *really* afraid of what's coming from google.

We have just 16Mbit down and 2 up (small city) and actually get that delivers, so we are fine. There used to be a problem with connection being dropped, but they actually managed to fix that, so we are fine

I am currently getting 100 Mbit/s down and 70 up for 20$ with no caps, but thinking of changing. I work from home ... so some stuff takes a lot of time even at that speeds.

JBroida said:

i guess the question should- is there an ISP that doesnt suck?

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Not in my experience. AT&T is way better than Time Warner here, but that's faint praise.

TWC is the worst. IMO all the ISPs in the US are pathetic. Compare to say, South Korea, our internet is embarrassingly slow. Another case of some dinosaur business with too much influence in congress. Good news is TWC may merge with Comcast to make one of the most hated companies of all time.
Just one piece of advice for everyone, do not let these jerks rent you a modem, if you don't have your own, that twelve year old piece of junk they brought over is costing you about $7 a month, so go on amazon or whatever and buy one and it'll pay for itself pretty quick and work about 100x better.

Where we've lived since running the business has offered very few options but compared to the Verizon (not Fios) connection we had at our old place this local yocal place we have now kicks ass. Our last 6+ yrs of Verizon were a constant hell of down time just like what you're describing Jon, it was almost unbearable at times.

We pay for 30 Mb/s down & 3 Mb/s up and they give us consistent 34 Mb/s down & 3.5 Mb/s up which is more than what we pay for. They offer even higher levels up to 100/5 but given the stability of the system I'm OK with what we have so why pay for more. Back at our old place I paid for the same service level I have now except they never delivered half of what they promised and the down times were crazy stupid.

I notice every year during the holidays I get errors, slower upload/download speeds, unable to stream HD, etc. I am pretty convinced that these big cable companies are siphoning off small business and residential bandwidth for the big players. I could be wrong, but I believe one cable company got caught doing it a few years back and was sued.

With that said, I have Comcast and it isn't too bad, but it is through a cable connection. I might try xfinity next time as it comes through the telephone line. From what I understand, if your internet comes through cable, then your bandwidth is affected by other users in your area, but through the phone line this is not the case. And newer technology has helped DSL have better speeds than it used to have.

Of course, this shared cable bandwidth would possibly explain the slower speeds during the high internet shopping time and when kids are home gaming, but I still cling to my conspiracy of big business screwing us just because it is part of the holiday tradition now.

k.

JBroida said:

I needed to rant a bit, and i figure there are probably some other people out there that are in the same boat i am in. We currently have time warner internet service at home. I pay for 100mbps down and 5 up. However, over the last month, our service has gotten so bad that 75% of the time, we get page load errors, and the other 25% of the time, we average .75mbps down. I've called them time and time again to try to resolve this, but there is nothing they have done that works. ATT is not much better here. I miss verizon fios... it was the best. I swear, i would even consider moving my apartment to a place with FIOS, but there is none near where we live (which happens to be just a few blocks from work).

How do people deal with crap ISPs?

What ISP do you use and are you happy with it?

/rant

Click to expand...

I too had issues with TMC and the service I received. The short of it? They improperly registered my modem. The result? Tough titties. I got a $30 credit offer for 18 months of people coming out and saying "It's fixed" only to have issues later that day.

My suggestion? Tell them how much you hate them. Typically that gets some results. They started a consumer relations program down here and about once a month I get a knock on my door asking me if I'm happy with my service. I use it as an opportunity to nail them a little more. I hate them very much.

You poor babies. You should have my sh*tty ISP. I live in a gated retirement community with 2700 condos. The management contracted with Hotwire Communications to give us 3mps service. Can you believe that. 3mps service in this day and age. The weird thing is during the day it might be as high as 10mps, but at night it goes as low a 1.5mps. I sometimes have problems with YouTube stuff, but I can stream Netflix with no problems. It's not too bad, but at my old residence I had Cablevision. There we had 20mps service and I never had any problems.

I'm lucky to get 300k transfer...quit yer bellyaching

99Limited said:

You poor babies. You should have my sh*tty ISP. I live in a gated retirement community with 2700 condos. The management contracted with Hotwire Communications to give us 3mps service. Can you believe that. 3mps service in this day and age. The weird thing is during the day it might be as high as 10mps, but at night it goes as low a 1.5mps. I sometimes have problems with YouTube stuff, but I can stream Netflix with no problems. It's not too bad, but at my old residence I had Cablevision. There we had 20mps service and I never had any problems.

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i dont know... at least yours is around what is advertised. Now, imagine that you pay for 100 down and 10 up and you get .8 down and 1 up consistently. Thats what i'm living with right now. Gonna try to replace the modem and see if that helps.

Jon, you will be happy to know that our twc service out here at edwards is even crapper than yours lol. It's the biggest complaint from people residing on base because we are trapped between time warner or at&t. If my husband wasn't a gamer I certainly would not be paying $85/mo for crappy Internet. I have heard fios is awesome though, sorry

My choice is AT&T or Cox. When I moved in I got AT&T until our computer crapped out. We were talking about replacing it and tried to reconnect with either company and were told that there was no service in my area, with both of the companies saying that they had no record of any service at my address since 2005. Well no **** guys, we are the first people to live here since 2005, go look up 9th ward levee breach. I still have no idea why AT&T has no record of us having service with them. I gave up and didn't buy a new computer. It is good to know about fios because I really like Verizon as a phone company and if they decide to lay cable in my area they will know that we are a real address.

I got a call from the Nielsen rating last night. I don't know what they want, but I'm going to complain about TWC. That seems like the right thing to do.

We live in a very rural area and have bellsouth. DSL, advertised speed is 3mbps. On the very best of days it will hit about 1.25mbps..Many days it will drop all the way down too 0.35mbps..Yes, 0.35 with an upload speed of about 0.04..A great deal of my wifes business comes from the net so it tends to hurt..i hate my net service but we have no other options living were we do.

Wow I get 30 down and like 20 up on my cell phone

Down under here, I generally get over 100mpbs down and 2mbps up and quite stable over the pass few years. The catch? I have pay a ridiculous $150 a month with 500GB quota for this cable service or I am stuck with 8mbps ADSL.

What is with the really low upload speeds people are saying they are getting

Too bad we can't pay them only for the portion of the service that they actually provide.
Example If they promise a download speed of 10 but you only get 2, then you only pay 20% of the monthly.
That would give them the incentive to deliver what they promise.

I have Frontier Communications because we are in a rural area.
I live 7 miles from where I work.
My speed at home is consistently 3 times as fast as I get at work.
So I added a second line at home and do most of my computer stuff at home now.

Yea, if I paid for the service I acutally get they would owe me every month..What the engineers tell me is that bellsouth oversold the bandwidth for our areas "box" as they call it. So in simple terms you have 100 people trying to use 50 "people worth of bandwidth"..

To anyone who's familiar with the area, I live on the Isle of Dogs in London, two miles from Canary Wharf - one of the largest financial centres in London - and up until 6 months ago we got about a pathetic 1Gb down, and less than that up. How absurd is this , smack in the centre of the biggest city in Europe, close to a major financial centre and that's all I could get. And even though we have dozens of providers here, they all had to rely on BT (British Telecom) infrastructure, so there was no difference between them, we are too far from the phone exchange, BT didn't give a s..t, and with copper wire speed degrades quickly with distance.
And then.... about 6 months ago the development where I live finally installed brand new optic fibre infrastructure that completely bypassed the phone system and all of a sudden from 1 Gb we jumped to regular speeds of 30-50. Bliss.

Kentucky said:

Yea, if I paid for the service I acutally get they would owe me every month..What the engineers tell me is that bellsouth oversold the bandwidth for our areas "box" as they call it. So in simple terms you have 100 people trying to use 50 "people worth of bandwidth"..

Click to expand...

Another problem you have with DSL is the further away you are form the "switch" the worse you service will be. When I lived in Atlanta I had DSL from BellSouth and the switch was at the end of my street. Maybe 1/3 of a mile. We had 6mbps service which was good enough. Two years later I move to NJ and got Verizon DSL. Turned out we were several miles from the switch and the service was s...l...o...w. After two months I switched to Cablevision and was rushed into the 21th century.