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Review by Vcize3 See Profile

  • Location: Ogden, Weber, UT, USA
  • Cost: $54 per month (24 month contract)
Fairly reliable, good enough to game on, good alternative to some other local options
Capped/throttled both daily AND monthly
Much better than the only other alternative in my area, which was 1.5mbps CenturyLink, but not worth choosing over Comcast
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For some reason, I live on the one street in my area that does not offer Comcast. My only real alternative to Digis is CenturyLink, which offers an appalling and insulting 1.5mpbs here. Digis offers a much more reasonable 12mbps/3mbps option, with some major catches.

Before I get into those catches, I will relay the good news. Digis works by running a fiber connection to a local antenna, then broadcasting that signal over the air to an antenna they install on your house. That antenna looks like your basic DirecTv satellite dish and is free to install with a 2 year contract (ugh). I'm a power user, and one of my main concerns with the paultry internet options in my area was being able to game online (PS3, XBox 360, XB1, etc). I can confirm that gaming through my digis connection is in fact reasonable. You'll always be in the bottom half of the pings in the room you're in, but there won't be a noticeable amount of lag most times. It's not good for gaming, but it's good enough, which is the best I could hope for.

Additionally, the service has been quite reliable. Downtime has been minimal in the ~6 months that I've had the service, and the area's snow-storms haven't knocked out the signal on the antenna like they do on the DirecTv dish.

Now, on to the bad. Aside from the 2-year contract (ugh) and somewhat slows speeds for the price (12down/3up for the same price as Comcast offers 50down/10up) this mainly falls into the data capping territory. Digis caps by both the day AND the month, in the following manner.

Daily capping:

-At zero usage for the day, you get 12down/3up on their most expensive plan

-Once you've used a meager 500mb (one HD netflix 20 minute show, or one medium download, etc) you're throttled down to 7down/2up

-Once you've used 6gb for the day, you're further throttled down to 4down/1.5up

If you have cheaper plans then the throttling is more aggressive.

On top of that daily capping, there is also a monthly cap of 250gb. Even among data caps, this is a pretty low/aggressive one. After that you will have to pay a pretty hefty fine for each GB you go over.

As mentioned above, I'm a power user and as such am fighting with this cap most months. I also straight up cannot do many things that I would like to. I'm a photographer and cannot backup my photos online in the cloud because I shoot in raw and I would exceed my cap every month. Additionally, modern game consoles (Xbox One and PS4) are pushing digital purchases and with games that often reach 40-50gb in size the digis daily throttling makes them take days to download and the monthly throttling means you can only buy a game or two per month without having to really scale back elsewhere to avoid overage fees.

In an age where cloud storage is becoming the norm and where there are services pushing online movie streaming, game consoles pushing large digital purchases, and services like Bitcasa offering unlimited online storage or Amazon s3 offering extremely cheap online storage these excessive data caps are just absurd.

I had Comcast in a previous city and hated it (constant downtime), and never thought I'd see the day where I'm constantly calling Comcast and begging them to add service to my area. If you're a light user then Digis will probably be fine for you, especially if Comcast is not available in your area and CenturyLink is offering one of its pathetic options as your alternative. But if you're any kind of semi-power user of the internet then you will be thinking about Digis' aggressive data caps on a daily basis.

member for 15.7 years, 5 visits, last login: 9.9 years ago
updated 9.9 years ago