Sunday, April 13, 2014
Colorized photo show...
Internet access...
Internet access... For quite a few years now, we've been using SDWISP as our ISP for our home in Jamul. The owner (Eric Williams) has done a wonderful job for us, with an excellent product at a fair price, topped off with spectacular personalized customer service. If you live in one of the areas that SDWISP services, you'd be crazy not to use them for your Internet access.
However, it's a wireless access service (due to the remote locations of his customers), and because of that its bandwidth is limited. They have several plans, with speeds up to 15/3.75 mbps – perfectly respectable speeds, but not as fast as urban broadband ISPs. Furthermore, SDWISP's links are concentrated, meaning that a number of customers share one fat wireless link to the wired Internet access point (the POP, for the geeks). That means that on occasion, if a number of customers happen to be accessing the Internet at the same time, your speeds may not be as high.
In our new home (just north of Paradise, Utah), the situation is much different. It just happens that cable TV for the town of Paradise runs right by our house. It's Comcast, so I signed up for that. I received my modem (an Arris TG862) and installed it yesterday. It took about an hour (and 7 modem reboots!) for Comcast to figure out how to talk with the modem – but once they did, the rest of the installation was painless and took only a few minutes.
I signed up for Comcast's second-tier Internet service: 50/12 mbps (they also have a 105/20 mbps service that is considerably more expensive). Speed tests to any server in the U.S. proved that the speed is real – I consistently got speeds 5% to 10% over what was promised.
It's amazing what a perceived difference that speed makes, most especially with videos. HD videos stream flawlessly, something we could only do intermittently in Jamul. And the fast web sites out there (Drudge Report is a good example) now “pop” virtually instantaneously. Awesome!
However, it's a wireless access service (due to the remote locations of his customers), and because of that its bandwidth is limited. They have several plans, with speeds up to 15/3.75 mbps – perfectly respectable speeds, but not as fast as urban broadband ISPs. Furthermore, SDWISP's links are concentrated, meaning that a number of customers share one fat wireless link to the wired Internet access point (the POP, for the geeks). That means that on occasion, if a number of customers happen to be accessing the Internet at the same time, your speeds may not be as high.
In our new home (just north of Paradise, Utah), the situation is much different. It just happens that cable TV for the town of Paradise runs right by our house. It's Comcast, so I signed up for that. I received my modem (an Arris TG862) and installed it yesterday. It took about an hour (and 7 modem reboots!) for Comcast to figure out how to talk with the modem – but once they did, the rest of the installation was painless and took only a few minutes.
I signed up for Comcast's second-tier Internet service: 50/12 mbps (they also have a 105/20 mbps service that is considerably more expensive). Speed tests to any server in the U.S. proved that the speed is real – I consistently got speeds 5% to 10% over what was promised.
It's amazing what a perceived difference that speed makes, most especially with videos. HD videos stream flawlessly, something we could only do intermittently in Jamul. And the fast web sites out there (Drudge Report is a good example) now “pop” virtually instantaneously. Awesome!
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