As some of you know I've got a new place out of the city (for a couple years now). With that comes some interesting ways to do things. We can't get cable for broadband. In this areas that is consistantly the fastest service with each headend capable of providing 5+ mps shared. There is cable across the street, but all utilities here are underground (I like that). With that being the case they aren't willing to bring out a construction crew to add one new service. For the last almost 2 years we have been using a wireless "broadband" provider. (Note the quotes)
Well, Qwest finally improved their hardware to allow us to connect to their broadband speed dsl. We ordered it and I finally got around to hooking it up this morning. I have not yet checked the upload speed, but it averaged
1.4mps after half a dozen download tests. Cool stuff.We did several dowload tests. Browsing, large files, FTP multi files, etc. No long ping times. No timeouts. Consistant downloads from 1.3-1.6mps.
Obviously overall service and down time issues will only be noticeable after the service has been in place for a few months.
Quote: The following can only be charachterized as satire or parody. Certainly no real broadband provider can really exists that actually performs like this.
Still, it can't be worse than I experienced with Beamsnail... er I mean Beamspeed. No its a parody. I really mean Beamsnail.
The fictitious company Beamsnail advertises downloads of 768K (.7mps) but I never at any time ever connected to the internet at that speed. Not even once. Over the course of the service for the last year and a half I did atleast 100 speed tests. The fastest I ever got was about 560K (average when it was working was more like 300K), but that was constantly interrupted by ping times in the hundreds of millseconds. Long enough that even human reflexes could notice it. It was cumulative too with some ping times that bordered on service interruption, and remote servers simpley disconnected after waiting for a response for as much as several seconds.
Add on regular service interruptions from several minutes to several hours intermittantly, and the 69.95/mo price tag and I have to say Beamsnail is only a fictitious broadband provider. It must be a name I made up to parody broadband services.
Anyway, so far Qwest highspeed DSL seems to be working consistantly and reliably. Since I can return the modem anytime in the next 27 days (it arrived on the 29th) I think I will wait a little while before returning the Beamsnail broadband wireless service modem. Oh, atleast until tommorrow. (They aren't open today.)