http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21670245 en Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:15:13 EDT Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:15:13 EDT http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,21719443 anon : The good thing about Buckeye seems to be their monthly channel additions and annual speed increases. I can't wait for the 50mbps they announced a couple of weeks ago. I had the Dish and would NEVER go back that unreliable service. Better double check Dish's HD promise too; they like to count channels that only have prime time blocks, premium channels that cost extra and local broadcast channels from markets that you could not give 2 cents about... The dish can have 1000 HD channels but what good would it be if you have to deal with the 1000 snowy pics...]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,21719443 Sun, 11 Jan 2009 07:23:46 EDT http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,21670245 silverone : I may not have a typical circumstance here as I run a Software business from my home after closing an office I was paying way too much for after the economy began to tank.
I employ developers in both S. California and Boston, MA so we're on the phone all day, not to mention I've also oufitted my home office as well as my 2 employees locations with CISCO VOIP phones tied to a head unit here in Temperance. So all total, I pay Buckeye for the 20 Mbps Service, the complete HD service on three tvs with HD DVR's and 2 other TV's with standard cable packages and two BEX non-VOIP phones for personal use. Altogether, my bill is around $140, which is amazing since I am getting around 30 hours of long distance phone service to my Boston and California-based employees rolled into that price.
I can attest to great overall latency in download speeds with all this powered on, working, and with multple users on VOIP calls. I was concerned but with some knowledge of networking and that I am using all Mac's at home for both laptop and desktop programming, as well as their own branded Draft-N Wifi Router and Apple TV's, I've got myself an extremely fast home for work and play with enough speed to download 2Gb SDK's and stream Family Guy episodes to an Apple TV attached to an HDTV well over 200ft away.
I'm attaching a SS from a Bandwith.com test just to show you what I'm getting during a peak hour workday period. This figure hugs 20Mbps after 7pm for me. A word about P2P traffic: Buckeye does indeed drastically limit any QOS once launching a P2P App and the normal P2P ports springing open. You can try opening an unusal port # via your own router and that talking directly with one computer but the overall quality will still diminish as compared to nomally being able to download a 180Mb 1080p Movie Trailer for Apple's website in a minutes time, it will take you ages to pass P2P packets back and forth. So stay clear from Buckeye if you're all about the Pirate Bay but it does allow you an amazing trunk of bandwidth to be able to bring your entire home into the Digtal Age. I do have to typically use Private P2P Apps to upload software and code projects to customers, etc, but companies typically use a Java-HTML based Web App now as an option for us developers since many ISP's across the US are limiting P2P traffic - so this is no biggie for me anymore.
So if you're looking to seriously work from your home and nearly replicating a classic office network, phone system, etc, and you live in either SE MI or the Toledo area, give the 20Mbps Service a Shot. My only complaint with Buckeye is unrelated to their broadband service, it's with the HD package and how few HD channels they actually provide when compared to a Direct TV with well over 100 HD channels now and perhaps the most puzzling issue is that I watch Detroit news since I'm a Michigander (sorry Toledo News, just don't know Toledo as well as MI) and all the MI News channels, the NBC, ABC, Fox, etc plus CBC Windor's channels look awful. They appear ghosty like Buckeye is pulling these channels via rabbit ears and then sending them to me looking terrible. Is this their way of trying to get me to tune into the Toledo versions of the same networks? Just kind of sketchy for how well the rest of the channels come in. Thanks All!

]]> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,21670245 Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:43:14 EDT