| I live in Saint Albans, VT and have Fairpoints (supposed) 7Mbps DSL in but I have never actually seen speeds that high. My peak speed seems to be around 4 Mbps between 3am and 4am. From 4am on the speed steadily drops down to roughly 1Mbps by 2pm. From 2pm until 4pm the speeds steadily stay in the 1Mbps ballpark. Starting at 4pm until after midnight the speed often drops to unmeasurable levels. When it can be measured between those hours, it is never above .2Mbps but more often is around .05 to .09 Mbps. I don't use the Fairpoint email because it's just another opportunity for them to cause problems. I still use web based email accounts such as Yahoo or Gmail as they've proven to be far more reliable than anything Fairpoint. Fairpoint technical support finally admitted after no less than a dozen calls complaining about the lack of bandwidth that their network in my area is "heavily over-congested" and that they were supposed to be doing a network upgrade about a month ago but things haven't improved in the slightest. I have gotten technicians names and employee numbers and have it documented with Fairpoint that I am not sending them a single penny until I have consistently usable speeds on a daily basis, all day long. So far I've had three months of free internet because of their lack of improvement. I suggest any customers of Fairpoint in the northeast US who are not getting usable bandwidth all day, every day call technical support and get them to admit that their network is too congested to provide the service they advertise and have it documented that you will not pay for their service until they provide the service they have advertised. The truly messed up thing about Fairpoint is that even though they know their networks in certain areas can not handle the number of customers they already have, they still accept new customers without warning them that their downstream speeds from afternoon until early morning will be basically unusable. The more they add, the slower it gets for those already on the over-congested networks. |
