Review by Mowergun 
UPDATED: 364 days ago
member for 5.7 years, 950 visits, last login: 93 days ago
 Charleston,Coles,IL
 $14 per month (12 month contract)
 about 5 days
 "A lot faster than dial up when it works"
 "In my first fourteen days service has been down three days and counting"
 "Unreliable so far, I hope it gets better"
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(ratings below consensus)
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I was a Consolidated Communications dial-up customer until DSL finally became available at my location two or three weeks ago. They had an introductory promotion of $14.95 per month for up to 3Mbps service for 12 months. After twelve months the price goes up to $39.95 per month.
My service comes over 3/4 mile of copper line from the terminus of the nearest fiber optic line. My actual speed seems to be just a little less than 1Mbps. That is fantastic compared to the 26,400 bps dial-up service that I had in the past, and I would be very happy if it were reliable. However in the first fourteen days of DSL service, my internet has been out of service for a total of three days and counting in two out-of-service occurrences. It is out of service now, and I am writing this review using dial-up.
Consolidated furnished me with a Consolidated branded modem with wireless capability at no charge, I think it is manufactured by ZHone, and also five phone filters. I installed the hardware myself. Consolidated sales people were friendly and helpful, and tech support (located in Texas) has been friendly and technically knowledgeable.
I am located in a rural area just twenty five miles from Consolidated Communication's corporate headquarters in Mattoon, Illinois and Consolidated Communications is my phone company.
I would be very happy with my Consolidated Communications DSL service if it were as reliable as Dial-up. I have been without service for three+ days out of fourteen so far. I hope it gets better.
Update: My DSL service is still down today, Thursday. This makes four days out of fifteen days and counting. Local Consolidated Communications repair tells me that they will not even start working on DSL outages until Friday or Saturday. Seems they still have telephone no-dial-tone outages that take priority over DSL service from the storm we had on Tuesday of this week. Funny thing is that after the storm Tuesday I still had DSL service for about three hours before it stopped responding.
Update: My DSL service finally came back up around 5:00 P.M. today, Friday. So at this point I have had a total of five days of no service during the first sixteen days of my Consolidated Communications DSL contract.
Update: My DSL service is down again today, Saturday. This makes six days of no service during the first seventeen days of my Consolidated Communications DSL contract.
Today is November 11, 2008. Over the course of the past few months I have found that I lose my DSL service whenever it rains. In addition, there have been outages recently that I understand are due to maintenance and changes being done by Consolidated. Typical day to day speeds have gotten slower than they were when I first got DSL service. In the beginning my wife and I could both watch videos simultaneously on separate machines. Now I can rarely watch a video on one machine without pausing it to allow things to catch up.
Followup comments:  texaschick67
join:2007-05-23
Conroe, TX | Crossing my fingers for Mowergun I wish I could tell you it will get better....but sadly I cant. I have had on again off again service for over a year now. Everyday is a crap shoot to see if I have Internet. | |
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Consolidated Communications
