It's the Bandwidth, Stupid?

Oceanic Time "We're not AOL" Warner Cable is running a TV spot claiming Road Runner is now "50% Faster" (Please correct me if I am wrong about this ad, I've only seen it once).

So, Oahu broadband users, is it really 50% faster? Has Oceanic uncapped your consumer broadband connection? Have you challenged your bandwidth lately?

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I noticed that, too. It made me laugh, as I have commercial Road Runner, supposedly full-speed download and 1 megabit upload. I run a server out of my house (http://www.zztype.com)

I regularly run tests on dslreports.com on my conneciton and I am regularly disappointed. I usually get half or less of the claimed upload or download speed from them.

I just ran the test to California site and get 1012 download and 588 upload.

It seems a little quicker, but not vastly so.

I giggled too, mostly because what's really of interest to me is not the maximum speed of their service, but rather the minimum guaranteed speed, which I always suspected wasn't maintained.

We switched from Oceanic to Verizon DSL a few months ago, and apart from a few outages, have found the speed to be comparable and the price to be the deciding factor.

So I gotta ask, Ryan: Verizon DSL - Are the setup horror stories true, or have they finally worked out the glitches?

Yeah, Ryan, and what's the percentage uptime on Verizon? On my Yahoo/SBC/Prodigy connection it crashes about 8 times a day, and I wanna know who to cuss: Verizon or SBC/Yahoo. If it's the latter, then I might just switch to Verizon's DSL; if it's the former, why should I believe the DSL connection from the phone company is any better than what I have at the moment? ('Course, it could be the modem...grins)

Setup horror stories? I'm not sure. Everything came in a box, and I set it up myself. It took a day longer than they said it would for my line to go live, but it worked. In fact, considering the DSL modem is across the room and is connected to our phone jack with a 50-foot extention phone cord, with a phone and modem connected to it with a splitter... I'm surprised it works at all.

The only thing I didn't like was the Verizon Control Pad that got installed on the PC, which is supposed to look like some kind of status monitor but really is an excuse to have Verizon's name and links pop up on your screen every time you boot up. I was happy to discover you didn't need it for the modem to work. (If you can 'ipconfig' and 'release'/'renew' via a terminal window, you can do everything the Control Pad would do for you.)

As for uptime, there was a period last fall that thoroughly sucked. It would be down for a whole day, or off and on throughout a given day, with no explanation given.

But overall, I'd say it's pretty reliable, and nothing a reboot every week or so can't fix.

I ended up going with Verizon in part because I came to realize that all local carriers have to cross Verizon's lines eventually, anyway. If you're stuck in a town with a monopoly, you might as well dispense with the middleman.

That and the big price drop that made the papers last summer.

this is the first i've heard of horror stories. i use verizon dsl and didn't have any problems with the setup a few years ago.

When I got hooked up it was less than dial up. Called up the day of install and it went faster than a T1 (tee-Hee). Also they gave me 2 DNS servers to configure TCP which at the install was disabled. Changed my MTU also but I think the big difference is that Oceanic must've changed router on me to have such a dramatic speed increase

http://ptosis.blogspot.com/

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