Regional Talk > Chicago > What's the fastest ISP in Chicago?

What's the fastest ISP in Chicago?

Comcast Business (tell them its for a home office) offers 100Mbps down / 10Mbps up with no caps for $369.95 a month.

If you call at the right time, you can get them to give you free install on a one year contract. Typically they want you to sign a three year contract for free install. I'm on the 12/2 and extremely happy. Not having bandwidth caps is nice.

»business.comcast.com/internet/plans.aspx
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"I want to legalize freedom" – Ron Paul

reply to L337
I would bet Comcast Business will be the winner as Scooby mentioned.

reply to L337
If price is TRULY no object, then you could look at some OC grade connections!!
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Ca···on_rates

Your local AT&T Terminal use a OC-3 so that's over kill, but yea OC-3 sounds about nice, just not the price. So far Comcast Business 100 Duplex sounds about the best but for some reason I heard people have 100 Down and 20 Up, what's the deal with that?

Are you gonna supply the demuxxing gear for the oc-3? Those things are a little pricey..

reply to L337
I need a pretty fast business isp network so I decided to link 3 x Comcast 100M Down / 20M Up into one line. I think that's good enough.

reply to bellhead
Sorry bellhead but what do you mean by demuxxing? I'm not that familiar with that term.

reply to L337
Well DOCSIS 3.0 is supposed to be capable of multiples of DOCSIS 2.0 download AND upload data rates. Maybe COMCAST upgraded some upstream data capabilities. »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Speed_tables. Downloads should be in multiples of 38Mbps and uploads should be multiples of 27 Mbps.

reply to L337
Usually an OC-3 is made up of channels which are individual t-1's, which are combined into a t-3, There are 28 t-1's to a oc-3, a oc-1 is around 51 mbs with overhead. Normally however the smallest sonet ciruit is an oc-3 "155mbs full duplex" in the sonet hierarchy.

Here's a wiki article on it..

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OC-3#OC-3_.2F_STM-1

In order to get the sonet circuit to talk to your router you will need a carrier head end unit like a dcu/csu which can cost several thousand dollars.

reply to L337
Yeah, I'm definitely not paying for that. =D

reply to L337
if you're willing to pay for 3 comcast business accounts @ ~$1000 I would look into your options from tier 1 providers and providers with local fiber running in your area

but just for purposes of trying to answer the question of the fastest for the buck, if you weren't at home...for about the same price or slightly less, you could have a 100 Mb up AND down circuit from Cogent if you're having it installed at one of their On-Net locations (they have a few hundred buildings downtown and in chicagoland "on-net" meaning they have fiber running direct into those buildings). for a business with demanding needs this is likely a better solution than trying to load balance 3 comcast circuits... (especially if there's multimedia streaming involved, pick your load balancing solution wisely). if you're "off-net" they can still provide service but it will cost more. it takes 5 minutes to fill out a quote form though and figure it out.

the AT&T offices only use OC-3 (~150mbps)? that would surprise me in the year 2011. especially if it's a CO connected to any IP DSLAM or U-Verse hubs. private corporations have more bandwidth than that these days...we have cross country oc48s and even 192s between major offices these days.

reply to L337
Time sure has changed. I recently got Comcast Business 100 Down as a trial and it's working pretty well.

Did you link 3 modems to one? Im not sure how that would work out or what the bandwidth would look like after that.
Super interested though.
--
CableTechs.org/"Horrible People with Integrity"

reply to L337
We used the Peplink Balance 1350 to do just that. 3 x Comcast Deluxe 100 and 1 x Clear 4G as backup.

»www.peplink.com/balance/tech-spec/

reply to L337
Wide Open West has upgraded to DOCSIS 3 and offers 50Mbs down and 5 Mbs up for $90 a month and they have no caps, or they never enforce them. Their business solution is not any faster, but has better upload, but it is only half has fast as the business package you got.
The bang-for-buck may make WOW a better bargain if you can take the drop in speed.
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