 linicxCaveat EmptorPremium
join:2002-12-03
United State
 ·Cass Communicati..
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| Broadband Wars and its strange side effects The proponents of broadband competition in Illinois have had a long time to study the issue carefully and inform citizens of facts while they swatted SBC and Comcast FUD. I wish every community had that same opportunity.
I live in an area where the City Council is surrounded by great opportunity but lack common sense. They hastily installed a fiber loop and then contracted with a third party located 1500 miles from the site to provide service. The result was horrendous. Service lagged far behind Cox and SBC while the City Council waxed and waned and patted their own backs. The job wasn't well done. The average download speed where I lived was less than 10kbps and lossy looked like Swiss cheese most of the time. I was told by the local dunderhead that I could not tell anything about the network by looking at PING and Trace Route.. said he, "That's like trying to diagnose your car engine with the window down."
After throwing $500 to the wind to suffer this miserable service for nine months during which time a virus hit the unsecured MS servers at least every other week I called SBC and picked up 128/1250 and zero lossy for ten dollars less than the local WISP.
Since then Cox and SBC have been in a rather comical one-sided war. Cox raises rates while SBC lower. In short, SBC is faster and cheaper than Cable in my part of the world. They peacefully exist with muni-owned services.
I wish the tri-cities all the luck in the world. My only warning is from my own experience. Make sure who ever is running the show knows what he/she is doing and can handle the networking involved. If not, you may wind up with a mess like ours that kills income and the reason for the service.
After the last virus induced outage that lasted more than 7 days, many of the WISP clients like myself sought greener pastures at SBC - especially after Cox killed home networking. |
