Posted on 12/27/2015 9:13:40 AM PST by Maine Mariner
We are just at the edge of DSL service. The internet service is at times very slow and video streaming can be a real pain. There are no plans for upgrading to higher speeds for several years. We are considering either Time Warner cable for internet service only. It looks like the fee is about $35.00 per month for the standard package or about $65.00 a month for an even faster service. We don't intend to purchase any TV packages just internet.
Any suggestions from fellow FREEPERS will be appreciated. We would prefer not to use Dish but would consider it.
I have a fun way to determine the source of junk mail. If I signed up with, say Dish Network, I’d use the middle intial “D” in my name... or add “Apt. D” to the address line.
Buyers of the address dutifully supply the telltale extra/fake letters.
Hi MM,
I’m on TW internet in Maine. Can’t use Dish because of all the pine trees....
I had to move up to the Turbo service to get reasonable download speed so take that into account for your budget. It still goes out a lot in winter storms when ice or trees bring down the lines.
That being said, Direct TV pic will be cleared than cable. As long as you can get signal...
NOT satellite for internet. Expensive compared to cable.
obongo was supposed to have this great initiative for rural internet way back in 09 / 10. So far we have seen none of it. We are five miles from town and there is not even a glimmer of hope we will see anything like DSL here ever. Fiber was laid along the highway ages ago in the huge activity by Gates or someone when fiber plow crews were on every rural highway in the nation it seemed. What was that all about?
We can’t even get line of sight RF thought there is a half-hearted local provider. I cling to my Verizon unlimited internet 3G iPhone 3. I can’t replace it without forfeiting my unlimited internet so I suffer on repairing my old phone.
I run Uverse for Internet, and DISH for TV.
I changed over to everything on Uverse for a year, but Uverse TV had the worst customer service ever.
DISH has excellent customer service, and the short outages caused by storms an/rain don’t last long, and I can still watch the movies on my DVR until it’s over. Uverse stores your DVR. Movies on their network, so you cannot resort to recordings when there is an outrage.
Or, because Uverse is cable, I can always watch tv online, storm or not.
Never put all your eggs in one basket.
YMMV.
Years ago (2000) I was one of the first ten people to get cable internet from our locally owned, very small, cable company and I was pleased. About three months later Adelphia bought the company out and within about five months my cable slowed to a crawl. It was better than phone line service but not by much. In December 2004 my cable internet died completely and Adelphia didn’t try to fix it and I picked up Verizon DSL. Not long after that Comcast bought out Adelphia and my neighbors said the service did not improve.
DSL was not bad but streaming was slow. This year Verizon ran the FIOS lines and all of a sudden our DSL started to go out for days at a time (coincidence, eh?). Since I did not want Comcast, as it was still terrible around here, I got FIOS and it is really great.
I’ve had dish network since 1996 so don’t want cable TV again. Had DSL with Century Link for several years but our speed was limited to only 1mps. A year ago we dropped DSL and landline switched our Internet to cable. Internet speed went to 20mps and even with added ip phone, our bill was less than DSL and phone had been. Now several family devices can be on WiFi and stream movies AOL at the same time. We wish we had moved to cable Internet much sooner.
Cable will provide better service, but be aware that Time Warner is known for world class lousy customer service. Retain a record of all interactions with them, and if legal in your state, record all conversations with their customer service reps.
Heh...see my post #8...
ping
.
Dish is a mess.
Half the time it is jumpy, the other half you get nothing because they accidentally deleted your receiver’s key.
.
For one thing, we had a lot of trees on our property and although the Direct TV installer found a good sight line, he also warned me that if the trees grew much taller, I'd probably have problems or lose my signal. Even as the dish was securely fastened to the porch roof, I ended up having problems if it was windy. I also had problems every time it rained heavily, or was very foggy, thick cloud cover and especially whenever it snowed. If it snowed, my husband would have to crawl out of our bedroom window and on to the porch roof and gently try to remove, brush the snow off of the dish. During the President's Day blizzard in 2003, my husband was out on the porch roof every half hour or so brushing snow off the dish so we could watch TV. FWIW, at the time we were still on dial up for internet.
The other mistake we made was buying the dish. We bought it from Best Buy (and not a complaint against Best Buy) but it was a Direct TV dish that came with the service package we purchased at Best Buy. Nearly a week to the day that the dish went out of warrantee, I started having problems with certain channels pixelating, i.e. breaking up, not all channels but for some reason mostly the channels I actually watched and HBO, and losing HBO caused me to miss the last couple of episodes of The Sopranos, the only reason I still had HBO which made me very angry.
I called Best Buy but as they explained, while they sold the dish and the package, all warrantee and service issues were Direct TV's problem. I called Direct TV and since the dish was out of the 1-year warrantee, they told me it would cost me a minimum of $50 just to have someone come out and look at it. Several times I was on the phone with Direct TV trying to trouble shoot the issue remotely and to no avail and was told I'd have to buy or rent a new dish. I ditched the dish and went back to cable - Comcast.
And around that same time I needed to occasionally work from home for my new job and dial up wouldn't cut it so I added high speed cable internet via Comcast. I'd never rely on satellite for internet.
Not to say that cable internet is always perfect, I've experienced a few brief outages over the last couple of years, mostly due to power outages, but overall, I've been very pleased.
Bump....
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