[XCSSA] DarkFiber: U Already Paided 2.5 times, DarkFibre was: AT&T IPTV

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

>   When you start paying $250
> to $750 per month for "T1 or better" service, a surprising
> amount of bandwidth magically appears in you neighborhood.

I thought T1 was old telecom technology, 1.5 mbits/sec, not much  
better than 128Kbytes/sec.

Last week, on my standard Road Runner service, I noticed I was  
getting 800Kbytes/sec on a series of 30-150Mb downloads.  Wouldn't  
that be equivalent to about 6 T1's?  Last night, however, I was only  
getting about 500Kbytes/sec.  A slower computer maxes out at  
128Kbytes/sec on the same line.

Because of high price for Road Runner I've been thinking of switching  
to DSL which is advertised to be much cheaper, and it is said that  
DSL bandwidth is comparable to cable now.

I'm not aware of any reason why I should consider Time Warner to be  
morally superior to AT&T, though it's quite possible AT&T has gotten  
more subsides.

Grande was out in my neighborhood apparently installing fiber last  
year, but their packages look pretty similar to Time Warner, so I  
don't see that it did performance-minded customers any good.  I'm not  
going to switch ISP to save $5, but I might do it to cut my bill in  
less than half.  I'm also disinclined to bundle my phone service over  
cable; I get about 3 cable outages every year, but last phone outage  
that I know of was about 15 years ago.  Current providers seem more  
interested in bundling extra services I don't want than in giving me  
high value internet bandwidth only.

Charles