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Review by wyvern 
member for 11.3 years, 1705 visits, last login: 110 days ago
updated 166 days ago
 Redwood City,San Mateo,CA
 $55 per month about 2 days "Connected quickly, speeds as advertised, no contract needed" "Caps" "Great, until they started using caps"
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Update: Now they are saying that they DO have caps (100GB!) and will start charging $5 for every 25 gb. This is, of course, ridiculously high. I'll be going to Comcast.
I ordered bare internet service (no tv or phone) on a Tuesday and was up and running on Thursday. So far everything is working fine. I ordered 10/1 service and am generally seeing 9-10 down and 1.2-1.4 up in speed tests.
The install technician showed up on time and had no problem with the used SB5101 I'd picked up for the occasion.
They said they apply no QoS or traffic shaping (other than capping bandwidth) and despite what their website says about total transfer caps per month, both people I talked to about this explicitly said that this was a mistake on the website and that only the highest tier (18/2 IIRC) has a usage cap. They also claim to be fine with running servers as long as they're not for commercial use.
There was a $20 installation charge since I did not already have service from them. Apparently you can do a self install for free if you already have Astound cable.
I did call tech support since I was experiencing high packet loss, but that turned out to be a problem with hardware on my end, so I can say that their tech support answered quickly and was helpful (and quite polite about me bothering them with something that wasn't their fault).
Overall, I can't complain about any aspect of their service thus far.
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Review by cesnikt
member for 212 days, 0 visits, last login: 212 days ago
updated 212 days ago
- Concord,Contra Costa,CA
- $40 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 14 days
- "I am ASTOUNDED"
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I just had the 50mbps for $40 a month from ASTOUND Broadband in Concord and the Bay Area. Installation was very quick, and immediate Web connection. No one ever gets all the speed they are promised. The average speed is between 16mps and 38mbps. I watched SLIDERS (Science Fiction) on HULU with no delays. My previous AT&T went up to 6mps (average 3 to 5)mbps. I purchase my own Motorola cable modem with 4 ethernet ports. I now have fast ethernet to my DISH satellite VIP 722 receiver. I have my Wii and DSI connected to the A/b wifi. If I get a fast Wi-FI "N" device in the future like an IPAD, I will have the speed necessary for fast connections.
This is sweet so far. 24 months guaranteed 50mpbs (max) and $40 month for 2 years.
Eat my Ethernet COMCAST and AT&T.
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 Review by weap0nr
member for 11.3 years, 1618 visits, last login: 1 year ago
lodged 1.2 years ago
- San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
- $130 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 3 days
- "getting more features (switched from comcast) for less money!"
- "none really...getting used to the channel lineup?"
- "switched to astound to save money, glad i did!"
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after the 5th straight month with a higher bill i called comcast to see how they could help me lower my bill and they suggested that i lower my internet service from the 15mbps service @ $44.95 to the basic 1mbps down service for $29 which wasn't going to do it for me so i researched other providers in my area and saw that astound was offering phone/internet/cable for the same price that i was paying comcast for just internet/cable plus i got starz and encore free for a year.
I pay 130 total because i have 2 international channels plus hd/dvr service and i have two extra cable boxes. for the same setup comcast wanted $190.
i'm getting the same quality of service for about $60 cheaper. even when the promotion period ends, i'll still be saving about $40.
i really have nothing bad to say about astound, heck even the installation guy came as promised and explained everything to me. the only issue i have is that the channel lineup is different than comcast so i have to get used to it. other than that i am VERY happy with Astound!
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Review by dcardena
member for 1.2 years, 0 visits, last login: 1.2 years ago
updated 1.2 years ago
- Walnut Creek,Contra Costa,CA
- $50 per month
- "looked great on install day"
- "now my connection takes a while... \"
- "dissapointed"
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We've been subscribed to Astound for a couple of months now. Initial
line tests were positive - the pipe looked fat at first glance. After a
while we started to notice drag, and now things seem incredibly slow
much of the time. I spend far too much time watching ridiculous messages
like "looking for google.com"
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 Review by g0nepostal
member for 10.8 years, 2249 visits, last login: 265 days ago
updated 1.4 years ago
- Concord,Contra Costa,CA
- $30 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 1 days
- "Reliable service, very few outages"
- "Services servers slow, haven't been back long enough to judge if they're still throttling"
- "Cable modems beat DSL any day, and Astound seems to be rockin' once again"
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August 2010 update:
I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCKKKK!!
Now that my contract with DSL Extreme is up for termination on 09/01/2010 (see my review of DSLX), I have gone back to Astound cable HSI. Nothing wrong with DSLX, but my residence is simply too far away from the Central Office (8300 linear feet, probably closer to 9000 feet when the street turns are taken into account) for DSL to be a viable HSI option. I can't stand Comcast, so I decided to return to Astound.
Astound currently has a promotion (until 09/08/2010) where 10 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up cable HSI is $30 a month for 12 months when bundled with cable. I decided to sign up for this promotion, but this time I bought a refurbished Linksys CM100 cable modem so that I would not have to incur the cable modem rental fee and would actually just pay the $30/month.
I walked into Astound's local customer service center with my modem and asked that HSI be added to my account, along with a few other changes (damn recession). The rep added the MAC address for the modem, provisioned the account, and told me that I was ready to go.
I then got home and installed the modem. Downstream synchronized OK, but upstream was having some issues; I then called Astound's technical support center; the tech was very friendly and actually scheduled a truck roll for this same evening when he couldn't see the modem remotely.
After this call the modem synchronized for upstream as well, with the speed tests showing an average speed of 12 Mbps down / 1.5 Mbps up.
Kickass!
I then called Astound and told them to cancel the truck roll. Now I'm rockin' away at much faster speeds than I had under DSLX.
Hopefully this go-around with Astound will go better than the last time, when Wave Broadband was first beginning to implement traffic shaping and doing a rather bad job of it. For now I'm simply enjoying the sickeningly fast speed. The real test will come tomorrow when I use a VPN to work from home while also watching movies on Netflix. 
$30 a month for 10/1 service is not bad at all. I'm glad I'm back.
gp
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August 2009 update: Now that Astound is part of Wave Broadband their service is now being capped/throttled. The last straw came when, despite having a local caching DNS as well as a proxy server on my home network (to help reduce network traffic), my HSI service kept getting throttled to less than 512Kbps downstream - on a 6 Mbps downstream account.
I have now signed up with DSL Extreme and have an activation date of 09/01/2009, so as soon as DSL service is live I am going to Astound's customer service center in Walnut Creek to hand in the cable modem and drop my HSI service from my Astound account.
See you later Astound, and good riddance.
(Original review is below)
I have had Astound Broadband for about four years now after ditching Comcast (Comcast had just taken over ATT Broadband). Thankfully, Concord has the option of either Comcast or Astound for its cable service, so I went with Astound.
Despite some growing pains Astound Broadband has been a pretty good (4/5 stars) ISP. It's connection reliability is excellent: I have had a total of 4 outages - each lasting less than an hour - in two years. Its routing is also not bad at all; we reach most any server in the continental United States in less than 50ms. Since my brother and I do a fair amount of gaming this is important.
NOTE: There are now reports here on BBR that Wave Broadband - Astound's parent company - is now capping its users. I too have noticed (but have not scientifically confirmed) that Astound does now appear to be using traffic shaping, as its speeds during long downloads have been all over the map. I have also noticed several times that the Netflix streamed movies I watch have had the stream speeds slowed down. If Astound is now indeed now capping its service then I will find another, uncapped alternative. Because of this I am downgrading Astound a notch.
When I first signed up for Astound I signed up for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 Kbps service at $40 a month, bundled with cable TV. Astound now has five different service tiers, with a 6 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up tier for $35 a month when bundled. This is the tier I am on now, and having 1 Mbps for upstream is awesome. I generally get about 92% of the rated speeds whenever I run speed tests, so I am getting what I pay for. Astound recently raised its rates for cable television service, but kept its HSI rates intact.
Growing pains for Astound are evident in its DNS servers, which have a nasty habit of going down or being extremely unresponsive. Because of this I previously used third-party DNS servers from Cisco and Level 3 for my DNS lookups and avoided Astound's DNS servers altogether. Also lacking is Astound's e-mail, which while good at blocking spam has a rather spartan (and confusing) webmail interface.
(Update: I have gone back to using third-party DNS servers from Cisco and Level 3; for a while I had been using Astound's but they're too unreliable and slow to use for my network. Eventually I plan to use my own caching-only DNS server, with the third-party servers as forwarding DNS servers.)
I've only used tech support a few times, mostly to report outages and slow DNS servers. However, each time I called I spoke to reps who appeared to be using scripts rather than being competent tech support staff. Since this seems to be a standard industry practice I won't downgrade Astound for this but will mark its tech support as average.
Overall, I'd rate Astound a 3/5 (used to be 4/5 but since it is now capped with traffic shaping as far I am concerned Astound HSI is no better than Comcast). It's not a bad ISP; connection reliability is excellent and the prices are not bad at all. Despite its shortcomings, if you don't mind doing a little work on your own and appreciate reliability Astound is an above average ISP.
EDIT: The monthly rate for 6 Mbps down / 1Mbps up is $25 when bundled with cable TV, and I recently had a short outage. However, given Astound's connection reliability, $25 a month is not bad at all.
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 Review by tvtek
member for 7.9 years, 539 visits, last login: 111 days ago
updated 2 years ago
- Concord,Contra Costa,CA
- $89 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Installation was done the day they rescheduled it to."
- "The installation was rescheduled!"
- "Not as consistant as Comcast !"
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First of all they sent me an email informing me that the scheduled date that was originally set up was not available. The day of the installation the installer was 1.5 hours late (however Astound did call to inform me). I had Astound over a year ago with HD then switched to Comcast. The internet consistancy with Comcast was better than Astound, but the HD picture quality with Astound is superior with less noticable artifacts of compression.
Update 11/16/09: Cable TV hasn't really had any issues with an exception of a few lock ups on the cable box. At that point I just unplugged the box for 5 minutes to reset it and all was good again. I have had more than 5 times I have lost internet connection and it has taken more that 10 minutes each time to obtain sync again. At this point I will go back to Comcast. When I had Comcast I never lost sync once during the year that I did subscribe. : )
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Review by Niltiac
member for 2.5 years, 0 visits, last login: 2.5 years ago
lodged 2.5 years ago
- San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
- $32 per month
- about 2 days
- "Friendly, knowledgeable and efficient service. Good speed, reasonable cost."
- "None so far!"
- "I highly recommend it."
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I considered a DSL provider but decided to go with Astound on the basis of their offer and reviews on this site. I've been extremely impressed. I got the High Speed 10 plan for $29 ($32 with cable modem rental) and it was installed within two days. Support has been extremely efficient. I really don't have a bad word to say about them - the only bad thing that happened was Comcast's fault (they disconnected me but Astound fixed this straight away). I have written more about my experience on my blog: »www.niltiac.net/2009/08/astound-···ts-name/
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 Review by sechs
member for 10.5 years, 2799 visits, last login: 76 days ago
lodged 2.7 years ago
- San Mateo,San Mateo,CA
- $30 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 14 days
- "Not Comcast"
- "It's Cable"
- "Cheaper than Comcast, but not really better than DSL."
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First step was to get into Astound's database. No previous resident here had Astound or RCN, and because it faces a street that Astound does not service, it was marked as unserviceable. However, all utilities come from poles on the cross-street, which Astound does service. I had to go into their storefront shop to get someone to put in an order to engineering to check if my house was serviceable -- which, of course, it is.
Installer came as described, but seemed to only kind of know what he was doing. He didn't bring a ladder tall enough to reach to the roof of my two-story, and didn't appear to have spikes for poll climbing. He cracked a piece of wood in the utility cabinet, and the install job, over all, was sloppy.
After ghosting problems on the TV side and mysterious internet drops, had a second truck roll. Technician tightened the connection at poll, which was apparently very loose, and replaced the five-way tap on the premises side with a simple splitter.
I appear to be on the same node as several nearby apartment complexes, and there is sometimes a distinct evening slow down. Even during the day, while pings aren't high, web pages will load slowly. DNS is slow and sometimes doesn't resolve at all. The e-mail service is a spam magnet.
Customer service is poor. Most of the time, I end up talking to someone in Washington State.
Once my one-year promo rate is up, I'll probably switch to DSL, which has served me well for many years in the past.
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Review by revmyo
member for 9.1 years, 73 visits, last login: 2.8 years ago
updated 2.8 years ago
- San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
- $30 per month
- about 5 days
- "Smooth phone order, skilled installer, easy changeover from Comcast"
- "Upload speed as promised, but much less than Comcast"
- "So far very good."
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We decided to bail on Comcast, which we had been using for several months essentially without incident, because the monthly charge was due to double (!) in the next couple of months. Also, we wanted to try a service with a less massive, looming, sinister, corporate shadow.
We opted for the "High Speed 10" internet service, with a guaranteed charge of $29.95 for 12 months, with no additional services such as telephone or cable TV. We elected to provide our own cable modem (from Zoom). Placing the order by phone was simple and quick. We selected a day five days out, and the installer arrived within the indicated time frame.
The installation process involved stringing a new cable from the utility pole across the street. The installer, a personable fellow named Albert, managed the job skillfully, including maneuvering an enormous telescoping ladder, meanwhile fielding a request from the neighbors to get his truck out of their driveway. Once the cable was strung, the connection to the house took about ten minutes, and the new modem was provisioned by the CO, connected to the house network, and was running smoothly within another ten minutes or so. Total installation time was about 1 1/2 hours, most of that devoted to stringing the cable.
Altogether the process was quite satisfactory. It's too soon to say much about reliability, but I believe there's reason for optimism. I did notice that the speed test showed a download speed (about 10-11 Mbps) comparable to Comcast, but the upload speed (about 1.5 Mbps) was perhaps less than half of what Comcast provided, at least on a good day. We consider that a reasonably small price to pay for getting out of Comcast's clutches.
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Review by eger
member for 9.1 years, 160 visits, last login: 183 days ago
updated 2.8 years ago
- Redwood City,San Mateo,CA
- $100 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 14 days
- "Fast, fairly stable, no 'SpeedBoost' throttling like Comcast"
- "Forced static IP address switch when migrated from RCN"
- "Better than I have expected after fearing the switch from RCN"
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My RCN cable became Astound sometime a while ago. Nothing really changed much other than my static IP address that I paid for changed. This didn't make me too happy.
But the speed seems closer to around 15M/1M now where the RCN was about 10M/1M. Not sure if there was a speed plan change.
For most stuff on the net I am able to pull the full line speed all the time (1300 - 1400 kB/s) and am happy with that. They also don't mask hops in my trace routes out (like Comcast) or employ any 'SpeedBoost' throttling type stuff that slows my connection down after a couple megabytes of transfer... Just full 15 megs down when I want it.
I would much rather have a connection that is stable 15M than bursting to 20M for a second then slowing to 8M (yea, I'm looking at you Comcast).
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