Review by kae  UPDATED: 1.3 years ago member for 7.6 years, 221 visits, last login: 14 days ago
Lawrence,Douglas,KS
$49 per month
about 7 days
"It's pretty fast and fairly reliable"
"It has download limits and going over is costly"
"It's the fastest thing in the area"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection Reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money:
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We have the Gold package for about $49.95 per month, but we also subscribe to their phone service and some cable tv services so that probably reduces some of the individual prices on the internet services as it comes as a package. The gold service is supposed to be for up to 4 PCs, Up to 21 Mbps Download, 5 e-mail accounts, 40 Gb bandwidth usage. Anything above 40Gb gets billed at $2/Gb.
The cable modem is a Motorola SURFboard.
I've seen download speeds up to 19895 kbps with upload around 726 kbps.
As for the internet product, I like the service. It can be slower than 19Mbps. What I've seen is that it has good burst speeds up to a point (like maybe 100MB, but then it seems to slow down and it gets into a steady bandwidth, which is still acceptable.
Customer support is not great, but pretty typical for a large corporation. Our service got shutdown once because they said we had a worm/trojan. I wanted to know the virus name and what damage was done, but I couldn't really get much information from them, and since we have several computers in the house sitting behind a router it would take a while to trace it down. I suspect that someone went to a web page and allowed it to run a JavaScript or some application which tripped the virus/trojan flag. I live with other people and while I have Firefox running on all of my PCs and Macs and I use NOSCRIPT, I can't guarantee what the others use. I can only encourage diligence. Anyway, it was difficult to get them to turn it back on. They wanted assurance from a "Certified" professional that the virus/trojan was gone. I guess they didn't think my 28 years of computer consulting was good enough. The guy who subscribed told them I was a certified professional. Anyway, they told us that if it happened again that it would require us to submit to them a letter from a certified networking professional that the computer systems were virus free. I understand their ardor, but it seems a little onerous for the typical home computer user. The real pain is that I had to go to a coffee shop to download updates to a virus program that was out of date. So, I guess this kind of colors my thoughts on their customer support.
I'm pretty happy with the service otherwise. The only thing I'm not happy with is that I think their $2/Gb price for going over the download limit is too high. I pay $49.95 for 40Gb and I think that I should be able to get an equal or lower price if I go over. I think the price should be more like $1/Gb or less. Even if they prorated it to $1.25/Gb, which would be what I pay for 40Gb, that would be better than $2/Gb. The price for going over the limit is more of a punishment for bad behavior than anything. I purchased one of the seasons of Farscape from iTunes and ended up going over the limit.
I guess that's my experience. If they would fix the fee for going over the download limit, then I would be happier with the service.
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