Review by jduffy 
UPDATED: 271 days ago
member for 3.2 years, 303 visits, last login: 3 days ago
 Cincinnati,Hamilton,OH
 $40 per month (12 month contract)
 about 7 days
 Cincinnati Bell
 "Reliable"
 "Slow, line prone to interference, have to bundle to get $40 price"
 "For a few more, bucks a month, Road Runner is much faster"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
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Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I was a long-time Cincinnati Bell Zoomtown subscriber. Gosh, I think it was more than eight years. Zoomtown was reliable, but being a ham radio operator, anytime I used any real power (greater than 25 watts) to my high frequency transmitters, Zoomtown would lose the link. This was a major problem especially when I moved one of my Cincinnati Bell land-lines to VOIP with Vonage. The other issue is the ADSL2 was supposed to be installed over a year ago to take the speed up to be competitive against Road Runner. It never happened. I think Cincinnati Bell is in such bad financial shape over the acquisition and disposition of Broadwing, that they simply cannot invest in their network.
Several weeks ago, I ordered a trial of Business Class Road Runner. 768 up and 6 down. I could also run my own servers for web (I could do this on Zoomtown) and email (I could not run email servers on Zoomtown). Also, RR gives me a dedicated IP address. The price is $59.95, about $20 more than Zoomtown. But ultimately I will move the home phone to VOIP. I am now paying Cincinnati Bell $40 for the Complete Connections phone package now, so when I go to VOIP that will run $25 a month so the net difference is $5.
I gave RR a try while keeping Zoomtown. Wow, what a difference in speed. I mean it is incredible and the upload is a bit faster than Zoomtown. So I had Zoomtown disconnected and keeping RR.
There was one other issue with Zoomtown. Tremendous latency with some websites - click and wait and wait and wait. Many other ZT users said it was problems with the DNS servers.
If I did not have the interference issue and if the speed would have been upgraded, I probably would have stayed with Zoomtown. But ZT stopped being competitive around here against RR, so I got tired of waiting and made the move. I am glad I did.
Now getting almost 10Mbs download and 1.5 Mbs upload with Road Runner. I have not seen anything comparable with Zoomtown. It was worth the change.
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