Review by tdb 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 7.4 years, 1187 visits, last login: 153 days ago
 Concord,Cabarrus,NC
 $29 per month (12 month contract)
 about 14 days
 "Can't beat the price, fast speed, wide open AUP"
 "Not a whole lot of information about the service"
 "Best broadband deal going in the greater Concord, NC area"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
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My wife and I decided to switch to dsl from cable after buying our first house in Concord, NC. CT Communications is the local phone company, and has been for the past 100 years or so (it used to be called simply, "Concord Telephone"). They were offering a discount on their dsl service with purchased with local phone service, and my wife and I were getting fed up with RoadRunner, so we decided to switch. The offer we took is here:
»www.ctc.net/Residential/Connecti···asp?id=1
We opted for the eSonic xtreme 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up since it was twice the speed of our fastest cable modem service. I also do a great deal of uploading and downloading in the background, and the cable connection always lagged because of it. I also liked that they apparently do not have any restrictions on running public servers for their broadband accounts. (see AUP here: »www.ctc.net/ABOUT_CTC/internet.asp ) They let you do pretty much anything you want with your connection, be it commercial or non-commercial. The only thing that they do not want you doing is sharing your connection with others. (Sorry, no free wifi hotspots or half-sies with the neighbors). The only downside I have found is the lack of details about the service on their website, and an AUP that should be rewritten. But then again, this is just the local phone company and not SBC/Verizon/AT&T. I doubt they have more than 5,000 to 10,000 dsl customers.
Order to installation was two weeks, as that was their first available appointment time. My wife told me the installer came promptly at 10 a.m. and set the service up with no problems. He was nice and friendly, and offered to change the web browser's homepage to myctc.net instead of AOL. (I had him install the dsl on a Windows laptop since few people know how to set up a Linux server.) It turns out having the Windows box available was not necessary, as there is no additional software needed to set the service up. We were given a Zhone 6211 ADSL2+ modem, which is included in the monthly rate. (CT Communications does not allow anything other than their own hardware on the system.) There is no other software needed to use the service. No login, no PPoE setup, nothing but an Ethernet card. (I did not know this before the installation, and expected to have to muck around with login/passwords, network settings, etc... just to change the modem over to a new computer. It turns out you just plug it in to the new computer and it works, just like a cable modem.) The Zhone modem's internal diagnostics and settings page are also accessible and have not been locked out by ctc.net .
All of the documentation to set up pop/smtp mail access, along with Usenet, is available online at »ctc.custhelp.com/ . Usenet service is through Giganews, so the retention and completeness should be fine.
I ran a few speed tests so far, and I have been able to pretty much get the advertised speeds. Here is one that got the best results:
»/im/33307322/4844.png
That specific test server has consistently given me those speeds. The other servers showed speeds from around half the advertised rate to most of the advertised rate, but that is probably due to congestion at the test server and not ctc.net . I have consistently hit 9.3 Mbps down on ctc.net's own internal speed test. (Which is fine with me, since they can only guarantee speeds within their own network.) Reliability so far has been fine, but we have only had it for four days. It has managed to stay up longer than our old RoadRunner service did, though.
As of right now, I am quite happy with my new dsl service from ctc.net. You can't beat the price and bandwidth. The rate does go up after a year, so I will probably have to see what I will do when it is over. But for now, I am quite happy. The service has been reliable for the past four days that we have had it, and everything seems to be working great.
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Update
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It has been about six months since we got the service, and everything is still running great. No downtime and still getting pretty close to the advertised speeds. Windstream has since bought out CTC, and so far it looks like they have left the internet side alone. Customer service told me they would still honor the service tier and speed we are paying for at least through the end of the 12 month agreement. I don't think that Windstream will drop the speeds for CTC customers since the infrastructure is there to support it. It sounds like CTC customer support is getting moved to Matthews, NC, which is just south of here. I have read the horror stories in the Windstream forums about tech support getting outsourced to India (Wipro). I'm not looking forward to that, though. I don't think it will be an issue though since I have had no problems with the service at all.
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CT Communications
