Best Internet Provider

[FactoredReality]

What Alcibiates said about sharing a cable line with people in your area is true but from the 7 years I've used cable internet I've never seen a drop in internet speed during peak hours.

When I lived in Iowa I fought this issue for months. Turned out that during peak hours it was the DNS servers that took the biggest hit and would get overloaded and so they would throttle or disable my half of their network to reduce load and recover the server.
What I have found is you either have no issue or its so bad you can't do anything.

[Silencei2]

When I lived in Iowa I fought this issue for months. Turned out that during peak hours it was the DNS servers that took the biggest hit and would get overloaded and so they would throttle or disable my half of their network to reduce load and recover the server.
What I have found is you either have no issue or its so bad you can't do anything.

Makes sense... sounds like that ISP was cheaping out on server capacity though... I would hope most ISPs don't do that but who knows these days

[Kenyth]

A way around the problem with overloaded DNS servers is to find some others to use as backups. If you ping websites from a command prompt and don't get immediate address resolution, DNS is the problem. Turn off DHCP on DNS for your connection and insert the static address of a DNS server from a local college or other public accessible server. Sometimes, if you do work from home, your place of business will let you use their public side accessible DNS server, if they have one.

[chefchris]

Cox has 1.5 Mbps down/ 256 kbps up for $29.99. I don't know anything about speed. Is that relatively fast? I don't do a lot of downloading. Maybe a cd every other week.

Thanks for everyone's help.

[mrtr33]

I guess it would depend on what you use the Internet for. If you play games, download lots of information, sometimes even communication applications (I'm thinking Skype, etc.), watch Hulu movies, or stream anything online, 1.5Mbps might drive you insane unless you buffer your streaming feeds. I know it would drive me nuts. RARELY do you get the advertised speed consistently.

Also, if you have your own website, are uploading pictures/music/movies/data to the web, 256 may not cut it, either.

But for $30, if what you mostly do is surf cigarsmokers.com, read e-mail and download the occasional CD, go for it. Nothing is to say you can't upgrade after a month or two of not liking it.

[chefchris]

We might be going with AT&T. Where's a good place to get a DSL modem for a reasonable price?

[kevin7]

Modem should be part of the equipment they provide

Verizon provided my modem free,if not you might be getting hosed

[mrtr33]

While I agree that it SHOULD be part of the equipment they provide, I've seen more nefarious practices in years past. First, they will probably give you an option: you can either buy their modem for, say, $75, or rent theirs for $10 a month. In which case, it would depend on how long you were planning on being there as to which plan you'd go with.

What's more worrisome is that you will probably just be buying a modem, which is very necessary in connecting to the Internet, but very useless all by itself. I also connect my modem to a router, a wireless router at that, to keep my house wireless and I like the idea of a hardware firewall. Should you decide to go with a router, there are numerous ways to go about setting it up. I use WPA encryption with an impossibly long password full of lower, upper characters, numbers, and symbols, a masked SSID, and MAC address authentication. The 70 year old neighbors probably will never notice, but a Wardriver will.

Bottom line: I've just always suckered up and paid the telco for the modem. I guess I could take a stand and buy mine independently, but I just never have. If you do get their modem, and have a router you want to connect, and can't, you may need to bridge your modem to work with your router....but the above should get you going for now.

[Kenyth]

While I agree that it SHOULD be part of the equipment they provide, I've seen more nefarious practices in years past. First, they will probably give you an option: you can either buy their modem for, say, $75, or rent theirs for $10 a month. In which case, it would depend on how long you were planning on being there as to which plan you'd go with.

What's more worrisome is that you will probably just be buying a modem, which is very necessary in connecting to the Internet, but very useless all by itself. I also connect my modem to a router, a wireless router at that, to keep my house wireless and I like the idea of a hardware firewall. Should you decide to go with a router, there are numerous ways to go about setting it up. I use WPA encryption with an impossibly long password full of lower, upper characters, numbers, and symbols, a masked SSID, and MAC address authentication. The 70 year old neighbors probably will never notice, but a Wardriver will.

Bottom line: I've just always suckered up and paid the telco for the modem. I guess I could take a stand and buy mine independently, but I just never have. If you do get their modem, and have a router you want to connect, and can't, you may need to bridge your modem to work with your router....but the above should get you going for now.

The benefit of buying from the Telco is that it should be set up for use when you get it. They filter devices by MAC address, so if you buy your own, you have to deal with a long call to tech support to get it going. Tech support reps also tend to be more difficult if you buy your own equipment.

WPA with a good passphrase is a good idea, but MAC and IP filtering is pretty useless these days. It doesn't take much to spoof those. They are deterrents only to the most casual wireless sniffers. Your encryption is your first, and best, line of defense.