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Review by jduffy See Profile

  • Location: Cincinnati, Hamilton, OH, USA
  • Cost: $40 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 7 days
  • Telco party 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
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

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.

Still glad I made switch to Road Runner.

July 2012 Update - Cincinnati Bell has been rolling out their Fibre Service in some areas of their market but it is still not in my community. I think the reason is that they have so much debt they cannot afford to really roll their service out to the entire market.

I did move from Business Class to Turbo Consumer Road Runner to get a better discount from Time Warner.

December 2012 - If Cincinnati Bell would ever get Fioptics out this way, I would like to give it a try. I understand for the money, it is a lot faster than Time Warner. Why it is not here yet is a mystery. CBT is just so slow to do anything. Not a serious competitor in this market anymore.

member for 17.6 years, 1966 visits, last login: 21 days ago
updated 11.2 years ago