I'd like to hear more about your "bad" broadband experiences.

November 12, 2004 12:45 PM

Do you have Broadband? If not, do you want it but just can't get it? Where do you live? [mi]

The "industry" publishes reports claiming that anywhere between 25% and 75% of Americans have some form of broadband internet access. Since graduating from college (and leaving the internet-enabled dorm) in 1999, I've mostly lived in trendy, technology friendly cities. Fast, cheap broadband in both DSL and (later) cable forms were readily available. I've been on extended vacation in a rather expensive quasi-urban (large, expensive houses packed close together, some low-density apartments and condos, lots of foot traffic). Due to some strange local telecom history we are 20,000 feet from a central office. DSL is actually slower and less reliable than a 56k modem, so the only option is cable. I'd like to hear more about your "bad" broadband experience.

posted by b1tr0t to computers & internet (15 comments total)

I've had broadband since 2000. Got it first when I lived in San Antonio, Texas, which is a major metropolitan area (over 1M population).

Upon learning that I would soon be moving to Great Falls, Montana (population ~65,000), the very first thing that I did was check to see if cable-modem was available. It was - and still is.

Thank heaven. Same price as in TX, but much friendlier customer service :-)

Once you've had broadband, it's too painful to go back to dial-up.
posted by davidmsc at 1:44 PM on November 12, 2004

I've had broadband since early '99 in Seattle. When I would go back to Vermont for summers I was dealing with 33k dialulp at my house -- the house I own -- and it was wretched. Me and my boyfriend even got a sucky little wireless network going with it, but man was it painful. Then my little town [900 people] got DSL via the local telco [Topsham Telephone Company] and I was all excited. Then it turns out it's just for people in the village and people in the outskirts [I live 16 miles from our central office, but closer to some of the mini-POPs they put in] get nothing. I'm living further south in the state now in a place with cable modem. DSL isn't available here since all the slots in the CO have been full forever and Verizon is not anxious to spend any more money putting any more in. We like cable modem just fine and have a real wireless network now, but every time I think about moving back to my house I think of the dial-up and cringe. Most people out here have dial-up, if they have internet at all, unless you're real tech-savvy or live in a city, and the state has only nine cities. My Dad was in a similar situation and went with Starband satellite broadband but the latency and outages in heavy weather were really pretty pesky.
posted by jessamyn at 1:59 PM on November 12, 2004

hells yeah. i can't live without broadband now, having worked with it for the last 4 years. if i don't have broadband, my internet use goes way down. i have cable at home (sacramento, in the suburbs -- they don't offer DSL there, really -- i think the best that can be acheived is 512 or something, which isn't even worth it) and the downstream is consistently better than most DSL connections i've been on (except for the gigabit or whatever that my friend is getting from DSLEXTREEEEEME in san francisco). i regularly get 400 - 600 kb/s. upstream, as you might expect, sucks, but is usable.

I've also experienced more outages with DSL than with cable.
posted by fishfucker at 2:11 PM on November 12, 2004

I live in the middle of San Francisco and the best I can get in my neighborhood (Twin Peaks) is about 300kb/sec with constant 5-10% packet loss. It's a combination of old neighborhood with hacked together wiring, and a gleefully incompetent telco (SBC).
posted by Voivod at 2:12 PM on November 12, 2004

I've had broadband since the beginning of time. Well, since the beginning of retail broadband in BC, at any rate.

I cringe to think of how much money the telco has made back off me. My modem rental has paid the damn device off tenfold, I should think.

I do so wish I could get ADSL without the dialtone (and subsequent line lease fee).
posted by five fresh fish at 3:08 PM on November 12, 2004

Oh, and my ADSL (Sympatico/Telus BC) has been nothing short of blissful since day one. I had one three-day outage during an equipment upgrade that went bad, and one dead modem that took a week to get replaced because Telus decided that very same week to eliminate what little remaining customer service they offered. I ended up going down to the CO and raising hell. Once a real live area supervisor heard the tale, the problem was solved within an hour.
posted by five fresh fish at 3:10 PM on November 12, 2004

Had Broadband Cable for 4 years now, on an extra special deal with ntl:home (in the UK), recently freely upgraded to 750kbps. Never had a rate increase from the original £20/month, and we also take Digital TV and phone. I reckon I can ditch the last two now, and still keep my net access (that'll be the last to go!)

It is a bit spotty - gives me errors every day, but refresh fixes any down page.

I could never go back.
posted by dash_slot- at 3:40 PM on November 12, 2004

I have pseudo-broadband with a satellite connection. It beats dial-up any day of the week and I hope to never return to dial-up. That being said, I drool over the thought of DSL, cable, or a wisp.
posted by busboy789 at 4:29 PM on November 12, 2004

Four years of cable broadband for me too. Every once in a while I give DSL another try. God does it suck. "Gleefully incompetent" does not begin to convey the full awfulness of SBC.

The cable just works, though outage time consistently totals about 4-5 days per year which is a pain when you're depending on it for your livelihood (and sanity). When looking for homes, broadband access is high on the agenda. I was recently surprised to find that even in the Bay Area it's still possible to find large swaths of populated area where broadband access remains quite limited. For example there are 150k people here in Santa Rosa, with tech companies like HP and O'Reilly nearby and downtown SF only 50 miles away; yet DSL coverage remains spotty at best (even 5-7 miles from city hall there's almost no house within range of a CO) and most of town won't get cable broadband until sometime later this year. Looking at other areas around the state, the options were bad in a number of places where I'd assumed the rollout would have taken place years ago.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 4:35 PM on November 12, 2004

I've had SBC DSL in Santa Cruz for a long time now and have been pretty happy with it overall. When we moved south of Santa Cruz, we were offered a double speed DSL package for a mere $10 more a month.

I can get some pretty amazing speeds across the connection now.

Having to use dial up when I go back east to visit my family is painfully slow but it keeps me off the net and spending time with them so I guess that's the right thing to do.

The internet on dialup is like trying to ride a tricycle on the Autobahn, you can do it but it pretty well sucks.
posted by fenriq at 4:46 PM on November 12, 2004

We've had cable for three to four years. Had one outage that was intermittant over three days. They would come out and it'd work for an hour or so, but go out again. It took them, well, three days to figure it out. However, customer service was well done and each time I called they were back by the next morning.
posted by deborah at 5:09 PM on November 12, 2004

I'm not in the US, but since you asked, yes I have a 8 down 1 up dsl line. it's about 60 US dollars a month.
posted by mr.marx at 7:04 PM on November 12, 2004

Despite living within the outerbelt of Columbus Ohio (and before that a half hour walk from OSU) I have never been close enough to a CO to get DSL.

I do not want cable. So there you have it. I use my 28.8k dialup, and I just make do.
posted by codger at 8:24 PM on November 12, 2004

I get spoiled so quickly. I've had DSL since 2001. It's starting to seem slow and I'm ready for the Next Big Increase. Gigabit fiber to my house, where are you? What would I use it for? I have no idea. I have no interest in downloading movies and what else is there that could benefit from that sort of bandwidth? Nevertheless I'm so used to PC/network performance just going up and up and up that it's starting to seem like the internet era is running out of steam. More coal! Pour on the coal!
posted by jfuller at 5:47 AM on November 13, 2004

My dad lives outside Marietta, Ohio, and cannot get broadband. Cable doesn't go that far out, and he's too far away from a CO to use DSL. His only real option would be satellite, but he's not sure he wants to do that -- 'cause don't you have to have a phone line for upload, anyway?
posted by Vidiot at 2:04 PM on November 14, 2004