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Review by imago0dei 
Posted: 9.8 years ago
member for 9.8 years, 8 visits, last login: 9.4 years ago
 Cincinnati,Hamilton,OH
 $39 per month (12 month contract)
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I have had Zoomtown (768 kbps/ 384 kbps) since early September and I have been very impressed. The installation was easy and took less than an hour. Speed has usually been fast and constant (up to 89KB) and the connection reliable. But in the last month, my connection has been dropping all the time, and my speed has been lagging. It's nothing huge, but I just wonder whats been going on. I live 300 feet off of my street lines so I don't know if my lines bad or not. I blame it on Fuse, because of the extremely slow dialup access my friends have always gotten with them. Overall I enjoy my ADSL connection and couldnt live without it (I had AOL before). So if anyone could help me out please respond with some suggestions, and if you know of a good bandwidth tester, please let me know.
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Review by sea4
Posted: 10 years ago
member for 10 years, 8 visits, last login: 8.7 years ago
Erlanger,Kenton,KY
Contract price not specified.
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I've had Zoomtown ADSL service through Cincinnati Bell since February 1999. Installation did not go smoothly. (They gave me a free month for that trouble.) Techs really don't have a clue, but try to be as helpful as they can. (I learned more from the fuse.discuss.zoomtown newsgroup.) The advertising misled me to believe that I would always be connected to the internet. Not true. But it is really a good buy and using a third party utility program to keep the connection live has made it a really nice convenience. My e-mail downloads around the clock as it is received. Below are the details:
$39.95/month for "TurboSpeed" ADSL Service and Fuse ISP (768k/384k)Static IP.
Installation,the Cisco 675 Router and network card were free. But you have to keep subscribed for a year or pay a penalty.
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Review by Julian6
Posted: 10 years ago
member for 10 years, 0 visits, last login: 10 years ago
Cincinnati,Hamilton,OH
Contract price not specified.
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The ordering and installation was quick and easy. I chose the self-install option, but a tech guy had to come out anyway and remove a chip from the network interface in the wall. After he took the chip out, everything worked great.
Having a noisy line, I get 512 Kbps down and 408Kbps up consistently instead of the 768/384 combination that they advertise. It is quite fast, however, and I am quite pleased with the service.
There are two negatives that I've experienced so far. Zoomtown (Cincinnati Bell's name for the ADSL service) requires you to activate your connection using a web browser to login. The service 'times out' after 30 minutes of inactivity. I wish it would just reactivate automatically.
Also, there have been two separate occasions where the service was completely out for more than 24 hours. Zoomtown's technical support was quick to respond and report that they had 'router problems' in the CO which affected everyone in my neighborhood. It took them between two and three days to fix it, but since then the service has worked flawlessly.
One other problem that may not bother most people is the fact that Zoomtown is structured using multiple levels of NAT (Network Address Translation). This makes it almost impossible for your computer to be a host of any kind (games, FTP, HTTP, etc.).
In general, however, it is MUCH better than a modem and worth the $39/month.
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Review by howarth
Posted: 10.2 years ago
member for 10.2 years, 0 visits, last login: 10.2 years ago
undisclosed location
Contract price not specified.
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Cincinnati Bell's Zoomtown has been a reasonably good experience in my case. I originally had my installation done in late June. CBT provides the Cisco 675 ADSL router, a NIC card if required and up to two hours of installation time for free. The customer also retains ownership of the ADSL router at the end of the 1 year contract which is nice. The price when I obtained service was $29.95 for the ADSL service and $14.95 for FUSE as an ISP at 384kbps/90kbps. The installation went well enough. In early July CBT released the Cisco 675 v2.10 firmware to its customers. This on the Mac was installed via a rather nice Java application using Swing. With the upgrade CBT eliminated the use of NAT and allocated 4 static ips in their private ip space to each customer so we no can have a 4 PC network on each ADSL router. A few weeks later they increased the base speed of the service from 384kbps/90kbps to 768kbps/384kbps at the same price as before. A few weeks later they announced a new package using CBT for Internet access while retaining the FUSE services (e-mail, nntp, etc) for $39.95. So in the few months since I had Zoomtown installed my speed has more than doubled and my monthly charges are now $5 lower. Not bad.
One other note. When they upgraded the speeds I discovered I could only make 640kbps/408kbps (408 is the nearest legal speed on the Cisco 675 for upstream at the current baud). After calling CBT a few times they finally sent a wiring technican out who placed a POTS Splitter in my apartment. Doing this gave me 6 dB of line quality back and allows me to connect at 768 kbps/408 kbps most times now. This isn't bad considering they measured me out at 18,700
feet with a line quality of 33 dB. The best part is that the POTS splitter and its installation were at no charge.
The only complaints I have really concern how Zoomtown logs in the ADSL user. One has to use a browser to login via javascript. It would be much nicer if this could be replaced eventually with some sort of PPP setup that would do it in the background on demand. The only other bad thing is that their chat room which provides tech support can't be accessed via a Mac currently since the Java based application apparently is incompatible and disables itself if it sees that a Mac is using it.
So in closing...while Zoomtown/CBT isn't perfect they do seem to be reacting agressively to Time-Warner's RoadRunner coming into this market. Hopefully things will continue to improve at the same clip.
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Review by selmore
Posted: 10.2 years ago
member for 10.2 years, 0 visits, last login: 10.2 years ago
undisclosed location
Contract price not specified.
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Cincinnati Bell
