I have been a loyal Bellsouth/AT&T DSL subscriber. While I don’t particularly care or AT&T’s wireless service, their DSL high-speed Internet service hasn’t been bad at all. It’s been operating continuously in Casa de Corsair for going on three years now. I’ve only got one problem with the service:
It’s slow.
In truth, it’s not that slow; I get around 6Mbps of download speed, which is more than plenty. However, I only get a paltry 256-512kbps upload. Yes, that’s right. About half a megabit per second data transfer up.
That sucks. Especially when I have to transfer a bunch of large files from home to my office, which I do with some frequency.
Now, being that when I find a service that works, I at least try to stick with it, I called AT&T Broadband Customer Service and asked if there was any way possible to increase my upload speed.
“Nope,” they said.
Next call: Comcast. I already had a disused Motorola Surfboard SB5101 Cable Modem from a previous stint with Comcast. Their fastest high-speed Internet package: a whopping 12Mbpsdown, plus 2-3Mbps up. And it’s the same price as the DSL I’m currently subscribing to. And that isn’t even their fastest package. Wow.
One problem, though: I’ve had Comcast before at Casa de Pius, and it’s reliability rating always sucked. It’d stay up for a few hours, then go down. Then up again for a day, then go down.
Once again, though, I took the plunge: I ordered their middle-tier package (12 down/2-3 up). $42.95 per month, and $20 for the first six months. Plus, since I already have one of their cable modems, I don’t need a modem rental.
I wired it up. Same $#@^&*! problem. It’d stay up for an hour, then go down for two. Very frustrating. However, I figured it out: the system was miswired. Once I rewired the QnQ cabinet the right way, I’ve had no further difficulty.
So I’m going to try out Comcast High-Speed Internet for a week or two and see what happens.
December 30th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
[...] Recently, I switched from AT&T DSL to Comcast Cable Broadband. I used to have a Westell VersaLink Residential DSL gateway/router/Wi-Fi Access Point, but replaced it with my Motorola SurfBoard SB5101 Cable Modem, coupled to a Netgear WGT624 v3, which I happened to have from a previous address when I had cable broadband before, downstream. [...]