Yeah, comcast is quite terrible. They only get better with competition. I have 1G up/down on FIOS, and it’s been 65 dollars/month for 6 years. Quite reliable. But what can you do when you’re somewhere when Comcast has the monopoly?
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How Fast is your Internet?
- Thread starter Christopher11
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Depends on time of day as I'm on T-Mobile Internet these days
Just tested ... good for my needs and value is excellent
Just tested ... good for my needs and value is excellent
Yup.
At my prior home, I had access to multiple ISP options. For years I would just swap ISPs, Comcast and FiOS. When the new customer deal would expire, I would cancel and sign up for the other service. My monthly costs would range from $29 to $50 a month, depending on the deal at the time.
Both ISPs were pretty reliable, but I preferred FiOS due to the symmetrical upload and download.
FiOS finally wised up, and had great deals for existing customers that didn't expire, causing me to just stick with them for the last few years I was at that address. I was paying $35 a month for 300Mbps FiOS service.
Needless to say, I was pretty sad to find out that my new home only had Comcast as an option. The service has generally been worse, and it has been a lot more expensive than what I used to pay.
Yeah, much of the PNW urban area has Comcast monopolies, Seattle specifically only allowed Comcast in the city limits. They would also allow centurylink DSL but that was connection speeds of the last century over copper. It seems to be slowly changing, there’s an independent fiber ISP slowly expanding in PNW cities like Portland and Olympia, but with rather odd coverage.
Curious what you guys will say, I was thinking that a great setup would be an internet plan like the ones described above, but with Starlink as a backup. That way, you really can't be without internet. It's important these days.
It really depends on your usage and the reliability of your connections. In the 6 years we’ve been here, our only outage was when the remnants of a hurricane came through, took out the high voltage transmission lines and FIOS went down till power came back. In that scenario, I’m happy just having the phone as a backup, with tethering if absolutely necessary. Your needs may vary, I mean it sucks not to have internet, but it’s just so uncommon here.
Agree with Profcutter's reply. I guess it depends on how often you lose internet & what you use it for. I work from home & we've lost internet about once a year or so for the last several years. I've been able to get by with hot spotting from my phone. I recently bought an iPad & the T Mobile 5 Gigs for 150 days for $10 deal so I can use that for my hot spotting needs.
T Mo also recently came out with a home internet backup plan that costs something like $20/month if you have a phone line with then, $30 if you don't. It gives you some amount of high speed internet & is designed as a backup in case your home internet goes down. I think it's like 130 Gigs, but I could be wrong.
The thing about using Starlink as a bkacup is that it's pretty expensive for something you aren't really planning to use. I could be off, but I seem to remember it costing around $100/month. I'm not sure that I need internet that badly that I'd be willing to pay $1,200/year for a backup that I will likely only use for a day or 2.
There are also other places to get internet if yours goes down. I know there are several places around town that will let you rent an office (more like an open space, but you do get wifi) for under $50/day. I have 3 of those on my list in case my internet goes down & hot spotting isn't working. I'd rather pay that cost than starlink (at least for my needs).