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Review by Bengie25 See Profile

  • Location: Wisconsin Rapids, Wood, WI, USA
  • Cost: $120 per month
  • Install: about 5 days
Dedicated fiber with reliable connection to the ISP
TV selection beyond basic is limited
Crazy stoked
Pre Sales Information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

Update 2018-09-01
Received my first stable bill after the change of plan, about $117 with all fees and taxes. Exactly as they quoted me.

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Update 2018-07-24

My $40/m 150/150 package contract has ended. Because it was a promotional contract, I would be getting downgraded to their $40/m 70/70 package automatically. They no longer have contracts for anything. I was thinking of sticking with the 150/150 package and paying $70/m, but I saw 250/250 is only $10 more for $80. Once you include the original contracted price for TV, our actual bill only went up $10 in total.

My wife ordered the 250 package when she paid the bill on Thursday and we were told it would go active on Monday. Monday went and nothing. I contacted their online chat tech support about 9pm Monday and asked. Turns out the order never got entered into the system. Customer service was closed and I had to wait until Tuesday morning. I called Customer Support at 8am, and when they asked how they could help me, I told them I placed an ordered but it didn't get entered into the system. The person immediately responded by saying that they saw the email from tech support and were about to call me. In less than 30 minutes, I had my 250/250.

A great change since I last tested out my internet connection is their bufferbloat is now even better! I noticed the difference when I tested with 150/150 on Monday during the time I was expecting to get upgraded. This was a very pleasant surprise because they already had pretty good bufferbloat results 2 years ago when I last tested. Their current results are so good that they can actually do better than what I can do. I'm going to have to completely change how I manager my bloat to make the best of the currently awesome situation.

Here's the results of my 250/250 without any shaping »[Fiber Speed test: 239.65/231.24 8 ms]
Here's the results with my current shaping »[Fiber Speed test: 240.42/239.65 8 ms]

I plan on tweaking my QoS further in the future.

Advertised price for 250 is about $80 and TV is about $30. My quoted final bill plus all fees and taxes for the two services is about $120. I haven't seen the bill yet, but I've never been lead astray by their customer service before.

P.S. The performance issues from the past updates haven't been an issue in a long time. I just forgot to update this review.

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Update 2016-12-31

My connection to the ISP is still perfect, but they seem to be having some form of congestion on their trunk during peak hours, resulting in an increase of about 50ms latency. I slightly reduced their score because of the increased latency, but it does not seem to affect jitter much, less than 10ms, and I still get nearly all of my bandwidth.

Being that my bandwidth and ping to the ISP are still perfect and my bandwidth out to the Internet is mostly perfect, they seem uninterested in attempting to fix the issue, which has been going on for months.

My bandwidth does sometimes dip into the 80Mb range, but most of the time it still hangs out at 145Mb.

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All I wanted was Internet, no TV or phone. Solarus gave a no-hassle flat rate for just Internet.

50/50 Internet with LAN like pings. Very stable all times of the day.

Their new fiber service is just rolling out and is in high demand, so it took a bit before they could get to my place. The install did involve some special machines to get the fiber laid to the house. Charter was a bit smoother because COAX is already installed, but because this was fiber, they needed to run the line into the basement, so it took about 1 hour for a basic install with no runs to TV, just a network cable from the basement to my living room.

The equipment was a Calix 4port 1gb switch, with 2 pots ports, a fiber WAN, a 16 port CAT6 punch strip, and a small CyberPower UPS.

This is like a whole new Internet. I was happy with Charter's Internet services as I had them for over a decade with only a few issues, but fiber with "dedicated bandwidth", even with only 50/50 speeds, is like a new Internet. I have never noticed "slow down" during peak hours.

Solarus does no throttling of any kind. Every time that I had called tech support for questions, there was no wait, and their phone support is all local, so no funny accents.

Update-----------

Now 100/100. They have upgraded their core router, upgrades all around. It seems they are now using an Active Queue Management because pushing my connection to its limits no longer results in an increase in latency. I now get a a 0.2ms ping to my ISP and a stable 12ms ping to Google. Downloading with BitTorrent with no limit, I can see upwards of almost 101Mb/s for brief moments. Even then my ping stays at a flat 12ms, but sometimes I will get a dropped packet. Using this method, I was able to maintain minute-to-minute averages of 99Mb/s consistently for 30 minutes strait between 8:45p and 9:15p, no signs of contention.

My bill has yet to change.

Update 2015-11-21 -------------
Bill finally changed recently. Went up $0.23, all of which was tracked to actual changes in taxes. Google has also increased to 16ms. Seems our route has changed to Minnesota first, and not strait to Chicago. It has been this way for a few months now, not sure if/when it'll go back. Bandwidth and pings are still stable as ever.

Update 2016-08-11 ------------
Upgraded from 100/100 to 150/150. No longer $89.99+tax, but $49.99+tax, and $19.99+tax 6 month promo. As always, near perfect LAN like Internet, about 30ms of bufferbloat without any traffic shaping, and unchanging bills. They have been playing around with routes from time to time. Not the crazy low pings to Chicago that I have seen in the past, but still Level 3 Comm. Typical pings to Google in Chicago is around 13ms, but can be as low as 6ms or as high as 16ms, depending on the routing. Jitter, loss, etc are always perfect no matter which route they use.

They did send some people over to install "some equipment", but it just turned out to be their own wifi router, which would have been free during the 6 month promo, but an additional monthly fee after. After talking to the technicians, they said many customers have old/slow and misconfigured routers and wifi devices and many could not handle the new lowest tier 150/150. I told them I did not need it and no changes where needed.

member for 13.9 years, 798 visits, last login: 3.5 years ago
updated 5.5 years ago


Review by tehk See Profile

  • Location: Wisconsin Rapids, Wood, WI, USA
  • Cost: $97 per month (24 month contract)
  • No Cap
Speeds are insanely fast and uncapped! I've transferred 7TB/month before...
Nothing.
Best ISP in Wisconsin Rapids, WI

100/100mbps symmetric fiber ~ Media Shower.

member for 19 years, 1 visits, last login: 8.6 years ago
lodged 8.6 years ago