Awful Internet Service Provider

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10-18-2010, 05:24 AM
bknesal

Awful Internet Service Provider

I live in a college town in the middle of Mississippi and my house is just on the outskirts of city limits, so only one internet service provider reaches my area, thus they have a monopoly on the area. My roommates and I upgraded from our standard 3 Mb/s internet speed to 7 Mb/s, and sometimes it is much faster... but not today... It's been nothing but slow today. I decided to run a speed test and the results were a ping of 1151 ms (that's over one full second to send out a piece of data then get it back; it should be less than 100 ms) and a download speed of 0.06 Mb/s, which is less than 1% of what we are paying for... I just needed to rant about it somewhere :soapbox:

Does anyone else live in a similar situation? This is not only annoying, but can be a real problem sometimes.
10-18-2010, 05:27 AM
Pops!

i pick up my neighbour's wireless signal.. and sometimes when i'm downloading multiple full length movies things will really get slow..

is that the same thing?
10-18-2010, 05:27 AM
BKratchmer

I'm in a similar situation as far as house location and ISP choice, but instead of high latency what we have is service failure at random times for varying lengths of time... which is very, very bad when you are trying to get work done from home! It was down for two straight days once, and all the company said was "we're not clear why the connection is failing" which is basically them saying "Your town is small and whenever we have a high network load we shunt bandwidth away from you." Not cool.
10-18-2010, 05:48 AM
bknesal

Quote:

Originally Posted by vthomlinson

i pick up my neighbour's wireless signal.. and sometimes when i'm downloading multiple full length movies things will really get slow..

is that the same thing?

HA! I don't think it's the same thing, seeing as how you're not only talking about downloading movies (instead of just regular browsing), but you're talking about downloading movies on someone else's network ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by BKratchmer

I'm in a similar situation as far as house location and ISP choice, but instead of high latency what we have is service failure at random times for varying lengths of time... which is very, very bad when you are trying to get work done from home! It was down for two straight days once, and all the company said was "we're not clear why the connection is failing" which is basically them saying "Your town is small and whenever we have a high network load we shunt bandwidth away from you." Not cool.

Our's will go down from time to time, but it hasn't lasted more than an hour or so yet. You gotta hate those big businesses with the monopolies on the little guys. It sounds like your ISP needs some bigger servers! I think mine would benefit from that as well.
10-18-2010, 06:01 AM
Pops!

yeah.. i was just joking.. but i know how you feel. i too used to live out in the middle of nowhere and internet would go out for days at a time.. i'd start detoxing and everything.. it was bad.. i need a constant internet fix.
10-18-2010, 07:38 AM
PaulKidd

You think you got it bad?

Here in Tonga, it's worlds away from your level of
service. I just wish that we had it as good as you do.

We pay $137 per month for a total download limit
of 3GB, on a three year contract. For that, we are
supposed to get 128 kbs service, but it's seldom
more than about 30 kbs.

Then there are the total outages for days at a time,
and "breaks" in connection happen many times a
day, even when the system is working.

Consider yourself lucky.
10-18-2010, 09:06 AM
MickR

We're not too far behind you here in Australia, Paul. We get the hours to days without service...We just have more choices of who will provide us with the bad service and how many GB of bad service we would like to pay for.

Mick
10-18-2010, 10:07 AM
wvloony

i have a similar situation, and i live in a rural county in wv, i have nothing but a local phone co-op, now while i am lucky and i have a resonable speed, it wasnt until a few years ago, i was even able to get dsl, i still cant get cable hookup, that is many years away, i know of some friends of mine who live in virginia, and are unable to get dsl at all, due to the fact that verizon isnt able to get it to their house.
10-18-2010, 02:08 PM
bknesal

Quote:

Originally Posted by PaulKidd

Here in Tonga, it's worlds away from your level of
service. I just wish that we had it as good as you do.

We pay $137 per month for a total download limit
of 3GB, on a three year contract. For that, we are
supposed to get 128 kbs service, but it's seldom
more than about 30 kbs.

Then there are the total outages for days at a time,
and "breaks" in connection happen many times a
day, even when the system is working.

Consider yourself lucky.

Wow! I do consider myself quite lucky, and fully acknowledge that it could be worse. Is that a 3 gb limit ove the course of 3 years?!?! Almost no point in having Internet if that's the case. I am quite sorry to hear about your (and others') situation. I am glad I posted this. I still feel like a victim of highway robbery, but I realize that it could be worse; I'm thankful that I live in a college town, otherwise I would likely be in the same boat given the area I'm in.

I too need my fix of internet. I am almost always online and enjoy playing video game over xbox live (when the speed is up that is). Also, all of my classes require internet access because course material is posted online. To accomidate for this, however, the wireless internet on campus is almost always lightning fast. Well I'm glad to have been educated as to how bad it COULD be, but I wish these companies would care more abou their service. Oh well, maybe one day. Have a good day everyone!