 | | Midco Coming to West Fargo I'm a DirecTV / QWest DSL subscriber that is seriously considering jumping ship with these two and going with Midco to provide cable and Internet now that they are moving into the West Fargo area.
I've been a long time subscriber with DirecTV but am starting to wish I had more rooms in the house that had cable access. I've been an equally long time subscriber to QWest.
QWest DSL service has been fine (I have a separate provider out of Grand Forks providing my ISP services). But I can't really dismiss the transfer rates I've heard people are getting with cable through Midco. I get 1500/768 u/d transfer rates right now (well, 1200/400 in reality). It would be great to get 8-10x that. I also game and understand that the interleaving issues I have from QWest's implementation would disappear.
One big negative I see with Midco Internet, however, is that it costs $20/month to get a static IP address. I get that essentially for free from my current provider. I've got my own e-mail / web / etc. server and not having a static IP is going to hurt (there's no way I'm going to pay a fee like that.)
If I get rid of my DSL, I think I'll drop my land line altogether saving even more money. I've got cell phones and have always been too lazy / fearful of changing my line to naked DSL -- given past experiences I've had with QWest tech support and changes to my phone service.
The cable guys have been routing their wiring (optical cable???) in the area and reached locations adjacent to my yard this past week. I've been in contact with the customer support at Midco and they mentioned that the rollout of service will be starting in October. I'm looking forward to it.
I noticed this forum was empty and figured I'd (hopefully) generate some discussion.
Cheers,
--tim | |
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 | | | Re: Midco Coming to West Fargo Well, nothing as of yet and it is mid-November. I was asked if I wanted to be a beta tester for service and said "Sure!" Haven't heard anything yet. I'm interested to see how things go when the deployment actually occurs! | |
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| | | | Re: Midco Coming to West Fargo About 9 years ago when I lived in Lincoln (just outside Bismarck) they dropped some fiber and offered their services here to about a dozen people for beta testing. A friend of mine was one of them. The service he got during the beta was just as good as normal service. We were all jealous on our 56k dial-ups.
I've had the service for 7 years in various locations. Including Lincoln, Mandan, and Bismarck. All areas have had good service. I initially wanted a static IP address but wouldn't pay for one. However, the service is so stable that I rarely even get assigned a new IP. I currently have had the same IP for 2 years now (I moved). At one point around 5 years ago I wanted a new IP, I left my modem unplugged for about 20 hours and when I got home I still got assigned the same IP.
In the modem diagnostics my SNR and RX/TX levels are near perfect. Which is surprising considering I'm living in an apartment now and I can about imagine how many splitters are in the walls.
I'm not sure what kind of bandwidth you'll be getting. I initially had the Basic package and received around 3500/256 on speed tests for $35/mo. I've had the premium service for 2 years now which is $50/mo. I receive around 5000+/600 average. Last night I ran one from the Grand Forks location and got 7200/800. Before the Grand Forks location was available I used Chicago and Texas and got 5000/500+.
From my experience it is worth it. I've never had unnotified service interruptions that lasted more than 30 minutes. In Lincoln one time one of the Midco guys was out there as all the services dropped on a couple street blocks. He went in the box and connected an alternate power generator and had the service back up. In about 20 minutes they fixed the original generator. So, service is fast they usually get on things right away. | |
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| | | | | Re: Midco Coming to West Fargo Sounds cool! I just got a call today and they have me slated to be a beta tester. They're sending out service guys out next Tuesday. I'll be sure to post my experiences here and let everyone know how things go! | |
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| | | I've been beta testing Midco cable and it works great. My Giganews download rates have gone from a paltry 160kb/s to 1.0MB/s. The dslreports.com speed test tool shows anywhere from a 3x to 5x increase in my download speeds. As far as gaming goes, things appear good on that front as well.
We've tested the VOIP phone and that works. The HD channels we get come in really clear so that's cool. I was disappointed we don't get Fox HDTV (watching the 2nd football game this weekend in HD would have been nice). The CS rep said that they are in negotiations to carry this in the future. We shall see.
I've got a 60" rear-project Sony and standard channels via the digital DVR are noticeably more pixellated than what we got through DirectTV. It's not really visible on the other standard def TVs we have. I'm kinda looking at the DirecTV vs. Midco as the trade off of only have 2 televisions wired with very good picture to several televisions with simply good picture.
On the DVR front, the DVR they gave us is ok. In the past I've used Tivo and MythTV (with MythTV the hands down winner in look, feel, and plain old usage). The Midco DVR guide shows a max of 4 lines of programming and has ad content on the bottom line. It doesn't seem that you can filter out the channels you don't receive from the list. To get around this, I've simply created a favorites list. But, to use it, you have to hit the 'fav' button on the remote everytime you bring up the guide. Somewhat of an annoyance.
The programming guide info for Tivo & MythTV have not been updated to include Midco as a choice in West Fargo nor have they been updated to reflect the recent changes to Midco's line-up. To get around issue #1, I simply selected a nearby community that is already serviced by Midco. For issue #2, I contacted both Tivo's customer support and Schedules Direct -- the guys that provide my MythTV feed.
The recording of the standard def signal by my Myth box has a little bit to be desired, but looks good enough.
At this point I'm heavily leaning to dropping DirecTV and QWest DSL and going for Midco as my provider. My biggest concern right now is if I drop QWest DSL, and then Midco oversells its cable bandwidth, I might be left with something worse than DSL. | |
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OinosPremium
join:2002-07-24
Minot, ND | lots of arp traffic? Anyone else seeing a flood of arp requests (who-has) coming from Midco starting about a week ago? I'm in Minot and starting last friday (april 18) my receive light on the modem has been steady and when sniffing the traffic it's been a ton of arp requests. | |
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| | | Re: lots of arp traffic? Yes, I'm seeing a lot of arp traffic. I took a couple of 10 seconds traces and counted 125 arp packets in one trace, and 283 in another trace. | |
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| | West Fargo customers Has anybody here gotten further information about the web space that's allotted for West Fargo customers? I've been trying to connect to "far.midco.net" but there's nothing defined at that address. | |
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| | | Re: West Fargo customers Here's the latest info I've received from support:
"I checked on this again, and was told that it would not be functional until the address switchover was complete in July. Since we are getting conflicting information here, I will try to get to the bottom of it." | |
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| | Midco speed tests Here's what I'm seeing from »support.midco.net/ regarding my speed via MidCo Max.
Download Speed: 29353 kbps (3669.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 736 kbps (92 KB/sec transfer rate)
This is in line with what I see for downloading from Giganews. I range anywhere from about 1.5MB/s to 3.0MB/s according to Newsleecher.
Feel free to post your results and experiences... | |
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| | Terrible Speed I'm getting terrible speeds with midco. It was so bad I upgraded to MicoNet Max (advertised as unthrottled downloads and 768 Kb/s uploads--old Midco service was advertised as up to 10 Mb/s downloads and 512 Kb/s uploads FYI) a couple weeks ago. Uploads are better, but downloads still stink.
The speedtests here rated me anywhere from 56 Kb/s to 350ish Kb/s downloads and at the bottom of the tests ran for Midco. Appalling. I'm running straight from the modem to a brand new high speed computer and I understand there are tweaks but I can't imagine any amount of tweaking will get me from where I am to where I should be with this service.
Can anyone explain why my speed would be so poor? | |
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| | | Re: Terrible Speed A few questions:
1) What city do you live in?
2) Have you tried to test your speed on support.midco.net? If so, what were the results?
3) Have you tried contacting Midco support about this problem?
4) Did you have a regular dial-up modem before the cable modem? Long ago, when I switched over from a 14.4k modem to QWest DSL, I discovered the machine I was using at the time was optimized for the 14.4k modem. After bumping up my RWIN and MTU settings (if memory serves) I gained a substantial increase in speed.
I just ran the support.midco.net test and got the following results, for comparison:
Download Speed: 30381 kbps (3797.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 737 kbps (92.1 KB/sec transfer rate) | |
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| | | One thing to remember, the advertised speeds are speeds within the midco network.. I just did a test on support.midco.net and got 10megs on wireless, I have midconet max. It all depends on the servers you are connecting to, and what that servers upload speed is.. Another thing to check, is your computer, make sure you dont have anything downloading in the background, spyware and virus will slow down your internet speeds.. Also log into your modem, 192.168.100.1 username and password is user. Go to downstream and upstream, post your info from there.. and also, make sure you didnt do any home wiring or change any splitters of more your modem from to a diff location, when they install it, they put it there and get the modem the best signal it can get, if you move it or change anything, signal drops, then your modem is connected by a string. | |
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| |  Motorola DCH3416 tuner
I'm paying a couple of 'per month' charges for digital tuner rentals. I'm wondering if I could pick up a Motorola DCH3416 tuner and have it pay for itself after a year or so.
I'm off to do some Googling to see what's possible and what's not... | |
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| | | Re: Motorola DCH3416 tuner It looks like you'd need a CableCard in order to use a tuner not owned by Midcontinent. They 'rent' M-stream (multi-stream) CableCards at a $3.95 monthly fee and charge a $35 install fee.
So, if you wanted to buy a HD capable Tivo (for example) and use it with Midco digital cable, you'd be looking at:
$300 one-time purchase of the Tivo HD
$35 one-time install fee of CableCard
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$335 start-up costs
$13/mo for the Tivo subscription
$4/mo for the CableCard fee
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$17/mo to use Tivo
Not exactly as inviting as I thought it would be. | |
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| | great speed @ midco.. i was having drop out due to the wireless router can't handle the speed and slow browsing but it fixed now, it turned out it was the built in firewall taking heavy load (not the NAT), it was belkin router i got a speed bump 12.5mbps to 15.2mbps (wireless) and browsing faster now
new service from moorhead, mn got it less than a month ago | |
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 yuduylPremium
join:2006-02-26
Cando, ND | first topic of this year 2010.... who's out there?  | |
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