Josh Saddler

If Comcast is your ISP, dump 'em if you possibly can.

Find out what's up with your connection.

Packet hacking. Makes me wonder what my own provider, Cox, may have been up to. At least I don't really see them making news the way Comcast does!

Damned American ISPs. When this stuff occurs, there's usually nothing we can do about it, as there's only one provider that owns the wire running into the home. I've got no choice if I want internet service; it's Cox or nothing. But I've no complaints, aside from more brief outages than I care for, and measly bandwidth for the (slowly increasing) money. It's slowly gone up to $26.95 per month, and that gets me 1.5mbit/sec down, 256mbit up. In more normal numbers, that's 200kbytes down, and 32kbytes up, which is why I make few big changes to my devspace. Takes forever to upload or change content.

My anemic rates are typical for American ISPs. That's a basic connection by the way; it's considerably more if you want the next two levels of service, and there's no guarantee your monthly bill will stay the same. We've already had a bill hike once or twice because Cox "experienced increased operating costs" and made an extremely poor business decision by passing costs directly to the consumer. I was paying something under $20/month, it was $10/month before that, and now ... $30 for a basic internet-only package. No cable, no phone, just basic internet.

Apparently, Europe is ahead of most everyone in the world; no matter where you are, what country or city, there's something like at least 16 different ISP choices. Or so some of the guys in #gentoo-dev like to brag. And they get more bandwidth, too. I saw some statistic that said Japan leads the world in bandwidth per capita; some ridiculous number like 56mbit per person. That's one wired nation. The US is behind almost everyone; we're being beaten by some developing nations, even. Though some 3rd world/developing countries have it even worse than we do; I remember a news story that reported Kazakhstan has a real-world price of well over $1000/month for basic access similar to mine.

What are your experiences with ISPs and service levels for a given cost? What's your connection like?