I'm seriously considering dropping AOL for various reasons. I'm located in
north central West Virginia. Possible alternatives I've heard about or seen
advertised are Road Runner and Verizon. I'm certain there are many other
choices I am overlooking. With the wealth of knowledge on this newsgroup I was
hoping for other suggestions. I am currently using dial up and would like to
increase my bandwidth and speed, price is however a consideration. Thanks in
advance for any suggestions.
The problem here is - it really varies. It always has even with
dialup. If there is some bottleneck , problem in your path youre
screwed period.
However in general in my region and even this varies cause I live in
Hawaii and on the mainland DSL Ive read was far more competitive.
Anyway here cable is a much better deal speedwise.
The avg is 2-3 meg speeds but recently RR and others have announced
and implemented higher speeds 4-5 megs ! Unfortunately this hasnt
happened in our region and they say it wont cause we dont have the
competition that the mainland has. Verizons DSL phone company here was
sold off and they were never that competitive to begin with. THey say
the owners will flip the company - sell it after 5-6 yrs so everyone
is saying there will very little investment if at all.
DSL generally is slower - here they offer 700 kbps or so speeds ,
faster than dial up but slow vs cable. The thing is though the cost is
$35 a month vs 45-50 for cable. So for the money speedwise if you want
max speed cable is better. If you dont need that much speed dsl may be
a better option since they start off at a lower price.
This is my region. In the past at least DSL had better speeds and more
competitive prices in other regions. In fact though cable is far
ahead of DSL in terms of subscribers one of the reasons they upped the
speed Ive read was to not lose any subscribers to DSL so it must be
competitive on some places. Also they both offer deals - $15 a month
or something for 6 months or 30 or something like that. They are
always offering deals to get you hooked. After that its the regular
price.
Many places with RR also offer Earthlink too over the SAME
infrastructure. This because of regs that force RR a monopoly to lease
their infrastructure to competitors - in this case Earthlink to create
some semblence of competition. EL in my areas offers a $5 cheaper rate
40 vs 45 I think. One thing cable prices have been hiked up
continuously - I think it started out at 30 or so , expect future
hikes.
Additionally sometimes there are deals if you get say RR cable TV and
cable modem services in a package. I live in a condo where they
negotiate building wide packages where the condo assoc pays the basic
fee for supposedly some discount and each person is billed only
special services above that to lock in people to RR.
