 Review by kilometers 
UPDATED: 79 days ago
member for 1.5 years, 310 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Sacramento,Sacramento,CA
 $110 per month
 "Reliable connection. Tech was awesome Great download speeds."
 "First hop is 32ms. Upload speeds are kind of slow. Can't get HDTV"
 "Surewest MDU installs could use some work"
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(ratings match consensus)
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So I decided to give Surewest a go given all of the good things I heard about them. I live in a condo AKA a Multiple Dwelling Unit (MDU) which are already pre-wired with cat5 cable and a patch panel in the master bedroom closet. Then the patch panel is linked to the telcom room of the building with another cat5 cable. However, the feeds into the telcom room are copper. Surewest generally uses FTTH to deliver IPTV, Broadband, and phone, but since we only have copper they still provide their services to use through FTTN. They use ADSL2+ to do this. Why they don't use VDSL instead I don't know.
The tech who came to install the service was pretty cool. He managed to complete the install in less than an hour. I guess having cat5 outlets in every room made it pretty easy for him. He also hooked me up with 6 months of free HBO and cinemax. The fastest internet I could get is 10/768 with two streams for TV. If I get 3 TV streams I would have to go with 6/768. I also have an extremely basic phone line for my alarm system.
Internet seems to be fine for the most part. I see about 9.5mbps download, however, my upload speeds are much worse than uverse and I only get about 640kbps up. My first hop is also 32ms compared to the 20ms I had with U-Verse vdsl. My TV picture is very clear but if I'm doing a lot on the internet side (like running a torrent) my TV picture lags behind or becomes really blocky. This is unacceptable and probably due to the already restrictive speeds offered through ADSL2+. Due to the SD and HD streams being much larger than those on u-verse I absolutely cannot have an HD stream and am limited to only a few SD streams.
So all in all, I think the service is fair for the price. It's about 30 dollars less than what u-verse cost. However, their system here is obviously built with FTTH in mind with the IPTV and very fast internet speeds. Using ADSL2 technology limits this greatly and makes the service subpar when compared to Comcast and AT&T U-verse. U-verse and Comcast beat them in upload speeds and the fact that they can provide HDTV content. They should consider running fiber to each building or at least switching to VDSL. The installer tech told me that they generally don't do MDU installs with fiber because they need permission to do it.
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