I’m looking to upgrade my connection from a 56k dial-up to broadband, so I head over to broadbandreports.com to check out services available in my neighborhood, ratings, and stuff. And now I’m totally confused. There seems to be no logic behind pricing plans. For example, one ISP shows:
Uh, what?!?! Why, within one company, would you offer two prices for apparently the same service, or the same price for different services (installation fee aside)? Can anyone explain how to sort through this mess?
Maybe you should call a rep & ask questions. If they are not clear, that might be an indication to check another ISP. FWIW. BTW: I like my DSL very much. Total is 49.99/mo. (includes dial-up for backup)
Just a quick note about the plans that you listed. Most “normal” home DSL setups have a dynamic IP address which is generally cheaper that a Static IP address. I didn’t check out your link, but that site may be more oriented toward “power users”.
From what I can see there you’re dealing with several different things:
ISDN line: 144 up/down special phone line basically, fairly slow but constant speed. Can be run to places not servisable w/ current DSL hubs. Generally 75-115/month
AKA expensive as shit last resort if you have no broadband access.
DSL 3 speeds:
384 up/down generally 39.99-59.99/month. Basically you get right what it says, you may share a line with one or two other people so you may get SOME slowdown at certain times.
ADSL (If I’m remembering this correctly) a dedicated DSL line just for you, generally 800k up 400k down (some of them are 900-1000k up and 700k down – that’s what I was trying to get, these generally are 60-80/month)
RADSL: If you don’t want to pay for a T1. UBER fast, I can promise you that you will NEVER use this to it’s full abilities with home use. You just aren’t going to find a single bloody server with enough open bandwidth for you to get more than 1meg/sec. These are usually 100 or so a month.
Basically what you need to know is this: Call the DSL provider that you fall under and ask them what speed lines they can provide. Generally they’ll have the 400k and 800k download lines, sometimes they will provide the 2k lines.
Am I going to be using this for home use? Looking up information, porn and video games?
Then you want the slowest ADSL line, it’ll provide you with more than enough bandwidth to get everything you want with the lowest monthly charge.
Do I want to host my own server in some form or another? Or, is it worth paying more for even a FASTER connection?
Then bump it up to the 800k one. But I’m going to say this: Just because you can download almost a meg a second doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to find connections to other servers that run that fast. You’re connecting through a series of computers to download some files, and each one with be running at different speeds and will be on different types of connections.
Basically: someplaces have a maximum for how fast you can download regardless of your transferspeed.
Also, you can be charged additional if your lines aren’t ‘clean’, whatever that means, but they wanted a $199 more for me so they can clean my lines of bridges & stuff they put on before.
A good thing to keep in mind is that when the ISP quotes you speed, it used to (and might still) be based upon algorithms that have nothing to do with reality, other than they approximate it. When I was selling DSL, back in the heyday, we would quote based upon the software, with a caveat that we’d have to test it to see what the line length really was.