Cable question..

LordHades · Post by **LordHades** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 4:46 pm

Alright, right now, and for far too bloody long, my landlord/friend has insisted on keeping the decidedly sub-par internet carrier of TDS, using their slower-than-believable DSL to provide access to the house LAN. Now, this is, as you might imagine, terribly frustrating to someone who does more than the nightly game of Diablo 2 over the net.. I went and dropped my freaking newsgroup server just because I couldn't download things fast enough before they cycled through.

Now, the biggest problem with fixing this is that our only viable alternative is Charter Cable, of which I've gotten mixed reviews from folks based on their location. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone in our area with it, so to come to the point... Can anyone provide any feedback on the service of Charter Cable for them, particularly in the Farragut area? If the responses are good, I can show this to him and win the arguement.. And if they aren't, well.. This never needs to have happened

LordHades[/u]

Alur006 · Post by **Alur006** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 2:08 pm

I've had plenty of friends with Charter and it's worked out fine for most. Cable companies get a bad rep often times for things that aren't their fault. Charter's problems come from all the highly wooded high density neighborhoods in Farragut weakening line strengths due to squirrels eating lines and single pole drops feeding more outlets than they can easily handle. I work for Comcast, we have similar issues in the Sequoyah Hills area for all the same reasons.

LordHades · Post by **LordHades** » Sun Oct 31, 2004 3:32 am

Thanks for the response, it's something to think about.. So the squirrels, huh.. Well, I did just buy a new bbgun.. Let's see if I can clean this up.. I've got a friend who just adores squirrel gumbo..

elasticwings · Post by **elasticwings** » Tue Nov 02, 2004 8:45 pm

Not sure how well Charter is, but I've used Comcast and Bellsouth. I've had much better luck so far with Comcast. I've either had sync or speed problems in three different locations with DSL, but that's just how DSL is. It's kinda hit or miss as to how good your service is. Of course, it could've always been bad internal wiring in each house I lived in. Cable doesn't seem to be near as picky about that from my experience. I know that the cable to my modem goes across at least 2 splitters, and I haven't noticed a performance hit at all. Only bad thing about cable is crappy up speed, but nobody really gives good up speed. Hopefully one day, Verizon's fiber to the home will make it up here so I can get the 5MB synchronous connection I've always wanted.

karmakaze · Post by **karmakaze** » Sat Nov 06, 2004 8:42 pm

i used to work for bellsouth. don't ever use there internet. software is as flakey as it can get and they just sent almost all their tech support to india. i have charter here in maryville and it has been great. however, it does depend on your location and the quality of the lines.

http://www.broadbandreports.com is probably the best resource for internet provider info.

LordHades · Post by **LordHades** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 6:00 am

I'd use it, but he's concerned with uptimes over performance. All he does is play Diablo 2 and download mp3's and south park episodes, none of which are actually sizeable, or he worries about the rate of. I'd like it to be up most the time of course.. but we're not even getting that now, and slow freaking speeds to boot.. so.. Oh well

Thanks for the feedback.

Asher · Post by **Asher** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:49 am

I'm a web designer/graphic artist..hence i rely heavily on my internet connection.I have charter and I'm connected right at 100.mbps..which is extremely doable, and the service here in Gatlinburg is suprisingly good. It -does- have some downtime but its rare, and fixed quickly.

ugh..now that i sound like a commercial..ill shut up.

iblis · Post by **iblis** » Sun Dec 26, 2004 9:25 pm

Charter is cool because it's easy to hax0r your cable modem into going really, really fast. That, and with the power of IP aliasing, getting a fuckload of IP's with a single stroke of the command-line. (Gotta love them eth0:<num>'s.) (Note: I cannot guarantee this works anymore. They might've gotten a clue. But it was fun, back in the day.)

I'm using Comcast right now, and there's been maybe 1% downtime, usually really early in the morning, and they've been good about posting notifications of said downtime on their site before doing maintenance.

But I'm honestly a DSL whore. Why? Because I believe that if you can't control your reverse DNS, you're not "being all that you can be". After all, if you don't have the ability to show up as "GWBisadookie-filledcunt.org" on sysadmin's access log, what's the point?