Rate Your Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

[Achoo22]

I live in the geographical center of the US and I would challenge anyone on this forum to demonstrate a lower quality, more expensive service than the Windstream DSL I receive. It is more than $70/mo after taxes for a 1mb/s connection that is demonstrably worse than dial-up during evenings and weekends. I have charts,graphs,spreadsheets and other diagnostics (largely collected over years via dslreports.com) and have never seen another individual with Internet connectivity as poor as my own. Please note: the DSLAM is right up the road and my line easily supports 10mb/s+, but the copper-fed DSLAM is the bottleneck. Fixing the connection doesn't require tearing up the streets or laying cables, just adding bandwidth to the CO.

 

[slyu9213]

Suddenlink, South West MO.

Paying $70 for 100mbps/10mbps + Home Phone.

 

[ironman1957]

I have Comcast for 25 years and I guess I have been lucky. I have no complaints. Sure my internet goes down here and there for about 15-20 minutes when they are working on it but in all I'm happy. I have the High speed package(I think it's Blast) I d/l at speeds up to 95-100 Mbps for around $104.00 a month.

 

[jigawatt]

I hope my ISP upgrades speeds again soon. I keep hearing about all of these 1Gb and 10Gb networks around the USA. 100Mb is getting old.

100 Mb is getting old? LOL I pay $50/month for 6 down, 2 up

We pay relatively the same... your upload rate is easily 8 times faster than what I get. Gotta love our extremely inconsistent speeds, too... and to top it off, they have strict bandwidth limits.

 

[palladin9479]

My ISP only sells dedicated bandwidth and never oversubscribes their interfaces.

That's so wrong....

The bandwidth limitation won't be at the distribution layer, that is piss easy to provide. The limitation will be either at the core router layer or at the egress points depending. ALL ISP's without exception, oversubscribe. If you have an aggregate layer serving 100 customers, each with 100Mbps subscription bandwidth, then you'd need to have 10Gbe of aggregate bandwidth just for those 100. Realistically your talking 500,000 subscribers for 50 Tbe (yes a T) aggregate bandwidth which is some ridiculously expensive equipment. Instead they will oversubscribe at a ration of 50~100 to 1 and possibly implement a large transparent proxy.

The entire Internet is oversubscribed. Petabits of edge bandwidth and only terabits of core bandwidth. The Internet runs on statistical multiplexing. Even the most expensive connections are oversubscribed by your definition.

Load testing my connection, running 24/7 ping tests over month long periods have resulted in 0.0001% packet loss to servers in other countries(Germany, England, and France) and less than 5ms of jitter, less than 1ms of jitter within the USA. Whatever you try to claim, I essentially get 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time, with virtually no jitter and no loss.

All in all, I've had more issues with my LAN than my ISP.

And none of that matters in the slightest to your statement that your ISP only sells dedicated bandwidth and doesn't oversubscribe, which is factually incorrect.

They, like all ISP's, most certainly do oversubscribe. They are betting that over 95% of their use base won't be using their connection to the fullest, that only the power users, that fraction that is less then 5%, will actually bother doing speedtests and downloading large quantities of data. And so they sell you a connection with the "bandwidth" which is essentially a meaningless number only referencing the speed of the final connection.

ISP's themselves usually purchase bandwidth from a tier 1 network provider, even if they are the provider, most governments require them to purchase from themselves at the same rate they sell to other providers. That is the real bandwidth they are reselling, and it's usually sold at a ratio of 50 or 100 to 1. Buy 20Gbps worth of external bulk, sell 1Tbps worth to your customers. It's how they make money and the reason why ISP's in the USA don't want to upgrade their networks, they would have to buy more bulk to meet the new demand without increasing subscription fees which means lower profit margins.

 

[Sklug]

I pay 79.99 for Gig speeds with Cox Internet in AZ. Couldn't be happier

Man, I live in Arizona, and while I am happy with Cox, the only service available in my area is max 150 Mbps Down/20 up, and it's 99.99 per/month

 

[Yogis75]

Rs.760 per month
1 Mbps Down upto 10 GB then 512
and 512 Up

 

[jmoor98904]

ATT in south eastern ohio is the only option, 3mb down and 756k up $43 and some change every month for the past 5 years... i call them once a year for an update and keep telling me they will not upgrade my area anytime soon.

 

[Kewlx25]

My ISP only sells dedicated bandwidth and never oversubscribes their interfaces.

That's so wrong....

The bandwidth limitation won't be at the distribution layer, that is piss easy to provide. The limitation will be either at the core router layer or at the egress points depending. ALL ISP's without exception, oversubscribe. If you have an aggregate layer serving 100 customers, each with 100Mbps subscription bandwidth, then you'd need to have 10Gbe of aggregate bandwidth just for those 100. Realistically your talking 500,000 subscribers for 50 Tbe (yes a T) aggregate bandwidth which is some ridiculously expensive equipment. Instead they will oversubscribe at a ration of 50~100 to 1 and possibly implement a large transparent proxy.

The entire Internet is oversubscribed. Petabits of edge bandwidth and only terabits of core bandwidth. The Internet runs on statistical multiplexing. Even the most expensive connections are oversubscribed by your definition.

Load testing my connection, running 24/7 ping tests over month long periods have resulted in 0.0001% packet loss to servers in other countries(Germany, England, and France) and less than 5ms of jitter, less than 1ms of jitter within the USA. Whatever you try to claim, I essentially get 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time, with virtually no jitter and no loss.

All in all, I've had more issues with my LAN than my ISP.

And none of that matters in the slightest to your statement that your ISP only sells dedicated bandwidth and doesn't oversubscribe, which is factually incorrect.

They, like all ISP's, most certainly do oversubscribe. They are betting that over 95% of their use base won't be using their connection to the fullest, that only the power users, that fraction that is less then 5%, will actually bother doing speedtests and downloading large quantities of data. And so they sell you a connection with the "bandwidth" which is essentially a meaningless number only referencing the speed of the final connection.

ISP's themselves usually purchase bandwidth from a tier 1 network provider, even if they are the provider, most governments require them to purchase from themselves at the same rate they sell to other providers. That is the real bandwidth they are reselling, and it's usually sold at a ratio of 50 or 100 to 1. Buy 20Gbps worth of external bulk, sell 1Tbps worth to your customers. It's how they make money and the reason why ISP's in the USA don't want to upgrade their networks, they would have to buy more bulk to meet the new demand without increasing subscription fees which means lower profit margins.

Sorry, they don't oversubscribe their last mile. I was explicitly told by a senior network admin that they can handle 100% of their customers using 100% of their provisioned bandwidth at the same time, to the trunk. The trunk itself is oversubscribed relative to provisioned rates, but vastly under-subscribed compared to actual usage, Even Tier 1 network provides oversubscribe, so I don't see the issue. Really, they do. Level 3 has blogs about how they oversubscribe. In a nutshell, as long as your 95th percentile is below 80% link rate, you're fine.

Residential customers do share the last mile infrastructure which means you have issues with general maintenance, but residential users get the same shared trunk bandwidth as the enterprise customers. All accounts are business accounts, they technically do not sell residential. Uncapped "dedicated" business connections with static IPs for cheap. /29 for $10/m

They can handle 5 of their 6 fibers(each link has a redundant fiber for failover) going down and still remain under 80% utilization. They have plenty of spare bandwidth. Ohh yes, and their sole trunk provider is Level 3.

When I was a new customer and getting my fiber installed, I had a personal rep, direct phone number and they kept my up to date with everything going on. I was even notified when my installation was going to be delayed because my fiber ring was damaged. I told them I need the Internet for my job and I already canceled my Internet with Charter. They had a full crew out at my street the next day. The entire street was full of construction crews and fixed that fiber and I had my Internet on the day they originally told me.

Speaking of rare outages. Murphy came around to prove me wrong. Partial outage(2 primary links, one link down) last night from 12a-6a because they were doing link maintenance. Last time they did this, my ping to Chicago dropped from 11ms to 9ms and a few months later they doubled my Internet speed. Another few months later they did maintenance again and my ping dropped from 9ms to 7ms.

Most maintenance is about 5-15 minutes in the dead of night, but they have been doing more link maintenance as of late, which is longer down times. Since they recently cut prices in half, I assume they're getting ready for another round of speed upgrades.

 

[RainCaster]

CenturyLink- named for the age of the equipment. 2.0 MB down, 200KB up. My AT&T mobile phone is 14 times faster.

 

[lebronjames]

NYC checking in paying for 50/50 getting 60/60 on FIOS $41.50 after taxes and fees for 2 years no contract .
Tiers for my deal $10 more for $75/75 or $10 less for 50/50. All other options are overpriced or too slow.

Also I have T-mobile for LTE and I get over 20MB down pretty much everywhere.
Service is unlimited everything except 2.5GB then slowed to 128KB for $25/month inlcusive of taxes and fees

 

[f-14]

in our country pakistan whenever there is heavy rain or normal rain the light is gone as usually and after when the light comes internet stops working one we have adsla telephone line comes from pole and then have a splitter which have 2 telephone ports one for router and one for phon

seems to me we should go into the electric power generation business, i have the hydro electric building skills.....

 

[IRONBATMAN]

Here in Singapore, we have great subscription plans for WiFi. I pay SG$40 a month for 200 Megabits per second, download and upload. When I download games from steam I get 30 megabytes per second ^-^

 

[hixbot]

150Mbps down and 30 Mbps up Fiber for $100 (CAD) from Bell Aliant in Atlantic Canada. No data caps. Speed is great, price and support are not. Competition is nil at these speeds so they can charge what they want.

 

[cmdrdata]

I'm paying $45/mo for TWC's 10/100Mbps ("ultimate 100") I-net service with no data caps in the Los Angeles area. Moved away from AT&T U-verse at 1.5/18Mbps (for the same price) and the difference is huge. I'm consistently getting 12/118Mbps even during peak times. I'm thinking about doing their 20/200 package for just $10 more.

 

[BlankInsanity]

Here in Grand Cayman, I'm using this start up internet provider that uses only Fibre, I got their highest package of 25Mbps down and 10-15Mbps up for about $130 KYD. Which is a little steep but is the norm down here in this little island. Reliability and support is way better than competitors such as LIME and Digicel, so far loving it

 

[hatib]

in our country pakistan whenever there is heavy rain or normal rain the light is gone as usually and after when the light comes internet stops working one we have adsla telephone line comes from pole and then have a splitter which have 2 telephone ports one for router and one for phon

seems to me we should go into the electric power generation business, i have the hydro electric building skills.....

es you are right but sadly our governament doesn't spend on the country thay spend on their own things our primeminster is one of the worlds best corrupt person nawa sharief he won elections by giving money to election commision

 

[atwspoon]

atwspoon: "This all proves that internet needs to improve. Cox in the midwest makes 100% profit off their internet service, they only pay for their cable tv contracts. Whenever roadwork is done in my city, they lay new fiber. I feel like Cox could have set up cheap fiber years ago!"

HideOut: "And where do you get that dumb idea at?"

I am unsure as to what you are referring to specifically, I offered several ideas in my statement.

 

[Preston_1]

All of you guys complaining about your "slow internet " which is very fast compared to mine some of you guys even complain about how USA is just now getting gigabit internet but now hear me out I live in Kentucky,USA and I am using a local internet provider I have dish TV and I called dish and asked if they could hook me up with dish net and they said its unavailable in my area so i called all the big company like Comcast Xfinity wind stream etc. none of them are available in my area so at that point i was pissed because the internet I was getting at the time was 2mbps upload and 124kbps download so I called my ISP asked them if I could upgrade my internet to their higest speed which was 54mbps download and 10mbps upload and so I upgraded it was as fast as they said it would be on the first day and I was a happy person because I had never experinced those speeds in my home before and then a week after that it got slower and slower and slower and now its 3 months later and my internet is at 2mbps upload and 12kbps upload s I am angry and internet is horrible so I rate it .000001 stars

 

[Someone Somewhere]

If you're rural, crap internet is part of the price you pay for super-cheap land. You knew this when you bought the property.

 

[JonnyDough]

Is Best Of Media shopping for ISPs now? Getting us tech savvy people to give you free market research...hmm....

 

[Andres_3]

I have a ftth gpon fiber connection in Bogota, Colombia with ETB , 70Mbps download and 35Mbps upload for about $70 USD, or 195.000 Colombia pesos, the service include phone and tv with 2 hd pvr boxes.

Stable service, great speed, no caps

 

[Abhishek1025]

LOLOL! My ISP i pay around $15 {INR 990} for my Broadband.. Which gives me 2mbps for 15GB and after 15GB limit it goes down to 512kbps bandwidth.. :-D
I enjoy 60kbps :-|

 

[kunfuninja]

I pay 79.99 for Gig speeds with Cox Internet in AZ. Couldn't be happier

your lucky man

 

[Yogis75]

LOLOL! My ISP i pay around $15 {INR 990} for my Broadband.. Which gives me 2mbps for 15GB and after 15GB limit it goes down to 512kbps bandwidth.. :-D
I enjoy 60kbps :-|

BSNL

675/- pm - FUP 2Mbps up to 10GB
Post FUP speed is 512kbps yeah 60KBps
240p video streaming without any pauses LOLOLOLOL!