Who Is Your Isp?

[E-Day]

I used to have Rogers for internet service. Service was always solid (no outages in 3 years), if a bit pricey, and annoying wit hthe 60 gig per month bandwidth limit. Once we got rid of our cable when they planned on raising their prices, we decided to switch ISPs as well since we had our home phone with Bell Canada. So we signed up for Bell Internet.

Meh.

The service as far as connectivity is good. However, Bell likes to throttle P2P traffic from 4:30pm to 2am down to 25kb/s. Quite annoying but not the end of the world. However, without even trying, I have gone over their 60 gigs per month limit. Last week (or two weeks and a half ago - it doesn't matter), I was at 59.89 gigs. I stopped all my downloads, and since then have not used BitTorrent or any file sharing programs, nor downloaded anything on my Wii or Xbox 360, or anything that would cause massive amounts of data to move. So I look to see how we are doing today; 69.63 gigs. Somehow almost 10 gigs of info moved to and from my home in that short amount of time while downloading and uploading nothing. And I definitely do not surf enough to use up 10 gigs of bandwidth, nor does Kaspersky update enough to use that much, nor does Windows Update download that much.

So on top of being throttled everyday for 10 hours, I am having gigs of bandwidth disappear on me. With Rogers I could check my daily usage, both downloading and uploading; but with Bell, I can only see the total usage for the billing period. Annoying.

So I am looking at moving to a smaller ISP, like some of the local ones in Ottawa or Acanac, who have no download limits, and even have a work around they promote to get around the Bell throttling, and are a good deal cheaper than Bell or Rogers. Does anyone have a smaller ISP, or had one in the past? What is your experience? Do you find them as reliable as the big media ISPs? I am trying to decide what to do. I don't want to be switching ISPs all the time.

[kbf_private_joker]

I have Time Warner cable internet (6MB) and have absolutely zero problems. Once in a great while it goes down, but I can count those times on one hand over the last 5 years. I'd be in deep crap if we actually had limits. Between my wife and me, we probably burned through 60GB just over this 3 day weekend. I'd be very curious to see how much we use per month, but TW doesn't have any such tool.

Over here, most people only have a single option, so you are lucky in that respect.

[E-Day]

Well, before satellite TV, you only had one choice for cable tv. Each company had it's region that it serviced. No competition. If you live in Ottawa and want cable television, you have to buy it from Rogers. there is no one else unless you get a dish (or live in a new apartment building where you can get satellite TV through your phone line with no dish.

Same with cable internet for the most part. any smaller ISPs have to rent/lease the cable lines from the cable company. Same with DSL. Bell Canada owns just about every single phone line in Canada, so smaller DSL ISPs have to lease the lines from Bell, and are also subject to any of Bell's bandwidth throttling and other limits. There have always been smaller ISPs around that offer what the big companies do. Does that setup not exist there? Are there no Ma & Pa Internet providers that lease the lines from the telecom companies?

[Phillyman]

When I was living with my parents in PA, I was with Comcast....had a 5mb/2mb. Then when I moved to Virginia....I went with Cox....and still have a 5mb/2mb but unlike Comcast with their 250GB cap....I have unlimited. Heck just backing up the download section of Retromags would eat 55GB!

[E-Day]

See, even with 250 gigs, I'd be happy. Last month I downloaded everything I could think of as well as seeding some things and only got to 120 gigs. I have no clue why we are limited to 60 gigs here for like $50 a month (fees and taxes in). You can get 100 gig service, but that goes up to $70+ a month. I can get overage "insurance" with Bell, which for $10 a month would give me an extra 30 gigs, but that's still getting expensive.

[Crazylightsaber]

My ISP is a company called Suddenlink. The rates are kind of expensive, but I have no limits on usage. It also fast and hardly ever goes out.

Before that i used AOL dial-up. Yuck.

[Mister Zero]

I also have Suddenlink.. it's been a bit sloppy lately, but it's never gone out on me. Some nights it's so slow I can only open one tab in Firefox. Why? I don't know. I have a bundle deal with phone + cable too, maybe that factors in somehow.

There are no caps as far as I know, either, but I've never enquired about that stuff. I'm not aware if I can monitor my stuff or not. Do you know, Saber?

[Angry_Sun]

I have AT&T Uverse for TV, as for internet I'm not to sure. But we use AT&T for everything, phone, TV, Internet.

[benjamindlevin]

When I am at home, I use Time Warner and have minimal problems. Here in Iraq we have this service that comes in from the city, called Tigris Net... it is expensive if you want a decent plan 128k is $100 for a month. it is not the best plan, but a hundred bucks is my limit. I can still download, though it takes forever.

[kbf_private_joker]

When I am at home, I use Time Warner and have minimal problems. Here in Iraq we have this service that comes in from the city, called Tigris Net... it is expensive if you want a decent plan 128k is $100 for a month. it is not the best plan, but a hundred bucks is my limit. I can still download, though it takes forever.

First let me say thank for your service to our country.

Second, what branch of the military are you in and what type of work do you do over there?

[benjamindlevin]

Army

I am our company Commo. We are support company for a field artillery battalion.