The skinny on High-Speed Internet

A friend of mine post­ed an update on Face­book look­ing for inex­pen­sive High-Speed inter­net, which got me think­ing and research­ing. So, I thought I would share in case there are more of you out there.

The main prob­lem is that there are very few com­pa­nies that offer afford­able High-speed inter­net. Among the few are Com­cast, Qwest, Earth­link. (I’ll just talk about Com­cast and Qwest—although I have had Earthlink—yuk). I won’t go into Satel­lite or inter­net from Cell Phone providers, because it is too expen­sive at the moment are not “always on”

You have basi­cal­ly two-kinds of high-speed:

• Dig­i­tal Cable (Com­cast): This uti­lizes your cable line to bring the sig­nal to your home.
• DSL (Dig­i­tal Sub­scriber Line) (Qwest): This uses your cop­per phone lines to bring the ser­vice to your home. Depend­ing on your exist­ing phone wiring, this could be a shod­dy con­nec­tion if you have old wiring.

For reli­a­bil­i­ty, Dig­i­tal Cable is real­ly the only way to go.

You will rarely have to restart your modem or have gen­er­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty issues. It is more expen­sive, but that is because there aren’t very many cable high-speed ser­vice providers out there, so there isn’t a real com­pe­ti­tion to low­er mon­ey. The only com­pe­ti­tion is with DSL providers, and well, that isn’t real­ly competition.

DSL on the oth­er hand, maybe cheap­er, but you need to be with­in so many miles of a con­nec­tion sta­tion to get a reli­able sig­nal. If your too far away, your modem will loose the con­nec­tion and you will need to restart your modem. For instance, when I had DSL, I need­ed to restart my modem and my com­put­er once a day, a real pain in the ass.

Now, they may tell you you’re with­in the range lim­it, but they could eas­i­ly lie to you to get your ser­vice, it isn’t uncom­mon. I end­ed up hav­ing what was called “ADSL”. (Asym­met­ri­cal Dig­i­tal Sub­scriber Line) Which basi­cal­ly means that the data comes to me at dif­fer­ent speeds. So, I was pay­ing for a fast speed con­nec­tion, but that was not what I was get­ting (depend­ing on the day, traf­fic, etc.) Some days it was slow­er than using dial-up!

So, you need to research and see what your going to be using it for. If your just check­ing email, putz­ing on the inter­net, DSL may be fine for you (if you don’t mind restart­ing it every day). But if your stream­ing video, send­ing large files, play­ing inter­net or lots of games, Dig­i­tal Cable is your answer. Again, you get what you pay for. If you want blaz­ing fast speeds, you’ll have to pay for it.

Com­cast does offer bun­dled pack­ages. I have all three (inter­net, cable, phone) so I save around $15 on my inter­net service.

Just for your info: The basic into plan for Com­cast is about $43/month (after their 6 mo. Pro­mo of $20/month. Qwests DSL basic plan, with no phone is $30/month.

Comcast’s basic plan is still faster than Qwests, so for about $13 more a month, you get bet­ter ser­vice, less tech­ni­cal hassle.

(Prices are sub­ject to change).

Again, research and get what works for you! Also, keep in mind that tech­nol­o­gy is ever chang­ing, and some of what I said may now be out of date or inaccurate.