Internet Service Providers

[sgosnell]

AT&T. No, I'm not happy. It's up and down, unreliable. Customer service has been terrible, until I finally got through the moronic recorded help crap and finally got to talk to a real human, who actually knew something. He said they've been working on the lines preparing for upgraded service, and was able to give me a free month's service and sign me up for the upgraded equipment for less money. It is supposed to only take 3 weeks to get it. In the meantime, it's still intermittent. Cable is faster, but much more expensive, and IME less reliable. I want nothing at all to do with Comcast under any circumstances. At work the DSL from Windstream was so unreliable the company finally gave up and leased a T1 line. It's not fast, but it is reliable.

[MikeTbob]

I have AT&T also. Not really happy with it but as mentioned above, it beats the pants off Comcast any day of the week. I think I would rather use dial up than Comcast. I get a little less up/download speed which is about right for most ISP's. I pay for 3MB down 1MB up and I actually get about 2.8MB down and .80MB up. Usually no problems with the service for us and we never have called tech support for Internet related questions, mainly we've (My wife ) only had to call tech support for trouble with the Cable/DVR equipment. We used to have the higher tier up/download package but we really couldn't justify the cost increase as we don't really use that much bandwidth.

[oz]

If there were other options available around here, I'd go for one of them, but the only other options are either just as bad, or worse.

We definitely need more competition, at least in my local area.

[Lazydog]

And there in lies the problem. Not enough competition.

[oz]

Right... some might think that having several options available is competition, but if they are not competitive regarding prices, speeds, services, uptime, and support, that's not the kind of competition that I'm looking for, and expecting.

[MikeTbob]

Even with competition, here in the USA I think we still pay way more than most other countries for the services we get. For some reason, I don't think that will ever change.

[Irithori]

Competition might be one thing, but there is also profitability.

e.g.: In Munich, you have lots of ISPs and options.
But moving only 30km outside can leave you with as little as a 56k line and just one provider (telekom).
There is some reason/politics for this, as the former monopolist (telekom) still owns the "last mile",
but other providers don´t really extend the lines either.
Too expensive.

Now, the US is a little bigger than germany, so the problem of "too expensive to extend the lines for just <insert_number_here> possible customers" might be even worse.