I haven't seen many 7.1 Mbps circuits, but what's really happening is that depending on loop length, you could see 7.1 Mbps. You have to be within 8k ft of a central office though. verizon does offer 3Mbps/768kbps up to 11k ft, and a 1.5M/384k speed up to 12k ft. All subject to the same loop length and quality of line.

 

Warren...what about cable? It's just as affordable [as DSL], and is relatively reliable. I've got Comcast in Mont'y C'nty which I use from my home office. In two years, I can't remember more than an hour or two of problems. It adds about $30 to your cable bill.

I've got friends with DSL, and the dialing s/w they have to use can be a pain. I don't need ANY s/w with cable. I've got three Macs and a HP laptop that share the connection wirelessly. No headaches.

- C

 

Actually our new $450/mo rate was negotiated after our previous 2-year contract at something like $1,100/mo expired in the spring. Yes, T-1 rates are dropping fast, but still no bargain!

 

Warren, the key questions are:

(1) What type of business do you want to do with this service?

(2) Just how "mission-critical" is your broadband to your work?

If you want better service and reliability, you'll need to spend more than $32/mo. If all you want is lots of bandwidth that works MOST of the time, say 99% of the time, then DSL or cable will do just fine. But before you think, "Wow, 99% uptime is pretty damn good", please realize that 99% uptime means your connection is down almost 8 hours a month or potentially a whole business day a month! For me, I need my ISP and Internet connection to be available better than 99.99% of the time!

 

[QUOTE=doin'it,Nov 18 2004, 10:12 PM] Warren...what about cable?

 

Cox is terrible. Adelphia is worse. However, I have Comcast, and it's amazing. I've had maybe 1 or 2 days of downtime in over 2 years of service, and it's almost always very fast. It adds about $40/month to my cable bill.

- Jeremy (jnn4v)

 

I have used an AT&T SDSL line for 3+ years, and since we're close to a CO the bandwidth is comprable to that of a T1. It has done well for internet and email connectivity for 60+ employees, and it also hosts a transaction server with 6000+ users. It has been very reliable and costs around $350 per month. In the last year I have added a T1 from Verizon at our co-location and I think it runs us $820 or so a month. The 7.1mbs sounds a little fishy to me...

The other thing you should think about is a solid firewall solution (of course depending on how you're going to use the connection). They have gotten much cheaper in the last couple of years since there is more competition out there, and some of them are very simple to configure and maintain....depending on what you're doing with it you might want to have someone who knows what they're doing look over your shoulder while you're setting it up!

Feel free to PM me if you think I can be of any more help to you!!

Steve

 

Thanks everyone. Well, I'm thinking of just staying w/ dialup as much as I hate to. I can't believe that it's almost 2005 and noone has can guarantee 100% uptime. I don't have trouble w/ dialup and 100% up time. And the prices, jeesh! $50-75 a month for high speed is understandable, but $400, even $1,000 a month with some, that's just crazy.
Thanks again,
Warren

 

Does your dialup company guarantee 100% uptime? I'd be surprised if they do. In your experience, I'm sure that it works 100% of the time ... but so does my ADSL. I haven't lost connectivity in the 2.5 years I've been using ADSL unless it was due to my own hardware (routers crashing and such), and in that case rebooting the router had me back online in minutes. A 99.9% uptime guarentee doesn't mean that it WILL fail 8 hours a month, a 99.9% uptime guarentee just means that for a given SLA that if it is down for more than that amount of time then you'd be able to get money back towards your monthly fee. I doubt any company would guarantee 100% uptime though just because when you're dealing with technology you can never depend on it 100% of the time.

In my opinion, depending on your line of work of course, the price/performance benefits of having a faster Internet connection than dialup should far outweigh the increase in price for broadband as well. Your productivity should increase if you do a lot of work with the Internet and you're able to get access to things quicker with broadband. Thats assuming of course your employees aren't utilizing all your bandwidth to download MP3s ...

If you're using dialup now, I don't think that you'd necessarily need a T1 with an SLA, but you'd probably be fine with Covad ADSL with SLA for $65/month.

But again, you need to weigh your own needs versus the cost.

BTW- Most business DSL offerings give some number of hours (like 150 hrs/month) for dialup access in the event that you do lose connectivity. Many consumer level routers will also automatically fallback on a dialup connection in the event that the broadband connection goes down.

 

Wow, that's great advice. Thanks Liqice. $65 a month sounds reasonable, as I sure would like to ditch this Yugo of an internet connection.
Warren