Highway Robbery for High-Speed Internet

[HillWilliam]

8. Where I live there are exactly two choices

Either landline (antique-technology DSL) from CenturyLink or satellite. I battled with CenturyLink for nearly two years to get the bandwidth I was paying for (when the POS wasn't out completely for days on end). An endless procession of technicians show up but not one managed to either find or fix the problem. On a 1.2Mbps line, the best I ever got was .75Mbps. On a good day. With a tail wind.

I fled back to Exede satellite service which is actually pretty good. For less money than I was paying for 1.2Mbps DSL service (and getting around .7) I get a pretty reliable 18Mbps download stream. The drawback is the freight-cap you have to deal with every month. One movie can put you over your cap and they'll slow you to 1.5Mbps. (That's STILL better than what I can get for DSL.) So, I had to give up Vonage and NetFlix for the time being.

In town I had a TW Business Class line, supposedly at 1.5Mbps. Every couple of weeks I had to battle with their idiotic tech support because they firewalled up inbound ssh and sftp connections routinely or they slowed the bandwidth to a crawl.

I've come to the conclusion that all wire-based Internet providers are charlatans and liars of the worst sort, about 10 rungs below insurance and used-car salesmen (or about 5 rungs below Babdiss preachas).