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Solve : Can I get by with 6/1 or should I stick with 25/5 internet bandwidth? |
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Answer» Looking to cut monthly Comcast Bill, ....BUT ... I am thinking that I should stick with 25/5 bandwidth, but am curious as to if anyone else here is on 6/1 bandwidth or lower who can share there experiences with the lower bandwidth and have Vonage + 1 or more devices that are streaming content without any problems? Chatted with Comcast Live Support last night and they offered the following stand alone internet packages: And I was trying to determine if I can go from the 25/5 that I am at now to 6/1 and not have any problems to save an extra $15 a month on top of the small savings from ditching Cable TV. Quote Our usage is heavy at times with the following concurrent use: *** I was thinking that maybe 6/1 might work if I throttled back the computers to give Vonage the bandwidth priority when the phone is in use. And 6/1 might work for up to 2 devices to be streaming without constant buffering maybe for Netflix or Hulu Plus. Instead of making the change to 6/1 and finding out I have strangled my bandwidth down below keeping everything happy and then having to go back to the cable company the following day and ramp it back up to 25/5 from 6/1 I figured I'd get some input from others who may be able to relate to the 6/1 or lesser bandwidth and the same services I am running on my network.Wow! That is really expensive! Here in Britain on fibre ("fiber" in US) optic I am getting 120/12 for the current equivalent of $55. I live in an urban area and there is competition which keeps the ISPs on their toes with offers and upgrades to stop people switching. Personally I think you will find 6/1 is too far to cut given the use you have outlined. WOW I wish I could get 120/12 on Fiber for $55 vs slower Coax Cable for $65...LOL Comcast has a monopoly on High Speed Internet for our area. With the only competition being DSL Verizon which is lesser bandwidth, Satellite Internet, and Dial-up, they thrive and can charge whatever they want without fear of losing too many people. Over the last 5 years I have had to make 3 changes, constantly shedding package services because they keep jacking the prices up. About 2 years ago when they split all the popular channels between 2 packages for cable TV we had to decide which one had more channels that we watched. They jacked the price tag from $87 a month which I had been paying prior to around $125 a month if you wanted to retain all channels that were in the prior package that expired. So we ditched 1 of the 2 packages to come back down to around $87 a month for basic cable tv and premium broadband 25/5. I was going to cancel the cable TV then and they said that if you did that your internet would not cost just $45.95 a month, but would switch to $79.95 a month since I am not part of the cable TV package. So for $7 extra a month I figured ok, I guess I will keep the cable TV for just $7 more since I am going to get shafted in a heavily increased internet provider service package and I can justify $7 extra for the cable TV since I am not going to get the $46 a month bill I had HOPED. I was told that they didnt allow this because too many people were ditching cable TV and so they had to raise the rate to retain people with Cable TV to where the extra $7 a month made sense vs giving them extra money for broadband and having no cable tv. About a year ago they then raised fees slightly and required all TV's to have a digital cable box, so I had to go down and geta cable box that I didnt need prior and now the biggest annoyance is that you can not set it up to only display the channels you have as part of your package but of the hundreds of channels and the way they have the channel packages set up, if you were the basic of basic for cable TV you had maybe 1 or 2 channels in every group of 10 channels beyond channel 10, so you would have say 14, 16, 23, 27, 33, 35, 47,48, 53, 56, and you would have to either manually enter each channel you wanted that you knew you had or scroll up or down with channel changer and it would take about 1 or 2 seconds to show you a screen that stated "This channel is not authorized" and with a frequency of 80% of non authorized channels and no way to program the box to skip over what you dont have, and no way to watch cable TV directly off of your TV that can learn what channels are active and inactive, I was extremely frustrated as well as many other people. *But Comcast owns the area I live in so they can do whatever they want without fear of losing people to competition. 2 nights ago when the 1 and only channel that my wife watched TLC was removed from the cable package we have, I was like ok, time to contact Comcast support and see what they are doing now. My wife complained on facebook and one of her friends said that they are paying just $35 a month for the economy basic and my wife with daggers for Comcast since every change has been money hungry and aggrivating wanted to switch to that to give Comcast as little as possible in money and yet still allow us to have internet, and I was like... It will definately not work out with that little of bandwidth. Maybe we could get by with 6/1 if I throttled everything except for vonage so the phone doesnt act up, but I have doubts that 6/1 would be enough. So I told her I would post here to the forum to check with others who might be on lesser bandwidth with similar data consumption and see what I get for responses. Thanks Salmon for response to this, and you are very lucky to have that kind of bandwidth for just $55. Comcast does have a more expensive package for more bandwidth which is called Business Plus Internet which is 67/8 for $125 a month, and one of my friends has that. I cant see paying that kind of cash for internet when he probably could get by on 25/5 without any issues since his internet bandwidth needs are pretty much the same as mine, but he has to have the best available... so he pays the extra premium. Talking with others who have other cable TV providers everyone is getting shafted in prices. A co worker is now paying $250 a month for Cable TV, Internet, and Telephone package. To me that kind of money is entry level for a car payment! Quote from: DaveLembke on August 15, 2013, 05:05:40 PM Thanks Salmon for response to this, and you are very lucky to have that kind of bandwidth for just $55. My cable service is fibre to a local "cabinet", a kind of metal cubicle on the sidewalk at the end of the street, and coax to the house. It is from a cable TV company which decided to add "high speed" internet to its offering in 2000. I was then on dialup with a 56k modem and not surprisingly I signed up at the outset. The intitial product was 256 kbit down, 128 kbit up. This cost 50 UK pounds monthly, ($80 approx). This was 10 times dialup speed. I remember a friend came round, and to show the speed, I fired up Napster and made him select 4 hip-hop tracks for download simultaneously. With dialup, you tended to do one at a time and come back in an hour and maybe see a 10% change in progress. He noticed that on my cable service you could actually see the download progress bars moving. He immediately said "I'm getting this!". After a year or so the various phone companies started bringing out DSL service and Telewest had some competition so they reduced the price by 50% and added a 1M/256k level for the same price as my 512 level, so I chose to double the speed. Over the years they periodically did this kind of thing, so I went from 1M/256 to 2M/512, 4M/712, and 8M/1M without spending any more money each month. Then I got a free speed upgrade 10M/1M reduced in price to $30. I chose to go up to 20M/2M for $50 and when British Telecom announced fibre to the home Telewest (by this time called Virgin Media) hit back by increasing all the 20M/2M customers to 30M/3M and then 60M/3M at no extra charge. About 6 months ago they emailed me and offered me an upgrade to 100M/4M for an extra $10. I took it, and about 2 weeks ago they upgraded that level to 120M/12M. I think this level is aimed at family homes with multiple PCs, phones, and connected TVs, and to be honest I don't really use it to the full. When BT's fibre price goes down, Virgin tries to retain customers by cutting prices and boosting speeds. In fact under European Union competition laws, BT must make its fibre backbone available to competitors, so there are plenty of competing offers around, and Virgin has 200/20 coming in 2014. Nice to have competition to keep prices lower and bandwidth higher I ended up playing around late last night to see if DD-WRT on one of my $20 routers would unlock a better QoS feature in which I could specify specifics for what devices by IP or MAC address has higher bandwidth priority as well as intentionally bottleneck my 25/5 to 6/1 and see how the vonage phone, netflix on 2 systems plus hulu on a 3rd system + online game world of warcraft behaved. DD-WRT for my D-Link DIR610 A1 flashed successfully and I have to say that DD-WRT has about 6 times more features than the D-Link firmware initially had. The layout of the D-Link was also sloppy in the port forwarding section and where you would expect features to be they weren't, and they were on the same page as other features which were less related. DD-WRT required a more involved configuration process, and took a while because most changes required a save and reboot in which it would take about a minute for it to come back up to its web interface to adjust further. The DD-WRT interface was better in way more features, but also has some controls that could have been better designed. But for the fact that its a set it and forget it device, I would only have to set it all up and wouldnt have to deal with the quirky interface for some features in which you have to Save, Then Apply, and then tell it to manually Reboot before the QoS bandwidth controls would take effect. I was chasing my tail for about 5 minutes running www.speedtest.net and wondering why I have it configured for 6/1 and I was still getting 25/5. Chose to reboot vs just saving and applying and then it took as part of the reboot. The other thing that could have been done better is the [ADD] button. When setting up a static IP reservation for the VoIP Vonage modem, I entered the info and then selected [ADD] and it cleared the info I entered and added another line to add a 2nd static reservation to. Looking down at the bottom of the page I found that there was a save feature and that in order to have the changes take I had to enter the info and then scroll all the way to the bottom to get it to save. But I set the VoIP to a bandwidth priority and allocation for 1M/768k as for I did some research and found info suggesting that it will work on 700k/700k. Set this as higher priority than everything else so that it is not starved by Netflix or a download etc, and this makes all other traffic when Vonage is active during a phone call conform to the remaining bandwidth outside of the 1M/768k and the quick test after being awake for 19 hours looked successful. So while I wasnt going to bother with the 6/1, now that I can test it without having to mess around with the cable company switching plans and having to waste time and GASOLINE each trip to adjust the bandwidth, I have my home bottlenecked on 6/1 using DD-WRT on this $20 D-Link and will test it through the weekend and then maybe come monday if all is well change to 6/1 and save $180 a year. * I almost didnt flash this router with DD-WRT because I saw some people having issues on Google search, but I saw that their issues were not related to anything that would affect me, and the one and only thing that I have detected so far that is odd is that the LED indicator behavior changed as a result of using DD-WRT vs D-Links firmware. The LEDS still function, but instead of blinking when a device on a port is busy with traffic the LED goes completely out. So as devices are getting info on the net the LEDS blink as they get short bursts of info, but a constant connection such as when using the phone makes the port show as if its not active since its not lit. This is not a major issue since its just an LED feature thats different and overall traffic is flowing well through it and with the advanced features enabled. Though my post will be much shorter than typical, for me it's ~60$ CDN for TV, Internet, and Phone. It's a mid-range Package as I understand it. Another short post. Kemp griping. The noisily wheel gets the grease. Post this kind of thing on as many social sites you can find. Write letters to the FCC. Writes letters to the PUC (Pubic Utilities Commission) of your state or providence. If enough people complain, grip, protest and drop service they will have to notice. Quote for me it's ~60$ CDN for TV, Internet, and Phone. It's a mid-range Package as I understand it I need to move 90 miles north to Canada ... Quote Here in the states this is what my bills use to be... - Got rid of Fairpoint for $65 a month landline and switched to Vonage for $25 a month using my broadband for my VoIP phone. to save myself $40 a month or $480 a year +/- random tax amounts. - Got rid of Verizon when term was up and switched from $130 cell phone package for 2 phones to the new TracPhones in which a Family plan with 500 minutes a month for 2 phones is only $15 saving me $115 a month!!! - Got rid of more than 1/2 our cable TV Channels when they stripped the Basic Cable TV of the channels and told us if we wanted the most popular channels that we have to pay $35 for each of the 2 packages, so they wanted an additional $70 a month to get the channels back that they took away on top of the $25 a month Basic Cable TV fee. *Wanted to tell Comcast where to stuff it and remained at the $25 a month for the most basic of Cable TV vs spending the extra money that they were trying to squeeze out. Attempted to get rid of Cable TV all together since everything I watch is online anyways and they said "NO NO ... if you want Broadband without the Cable TV then the Broadband service price tag jumps to $79.99 a month since its only $45.95 per month because its a "PACKAGE" and outside of this "PACKAGE" its $79.99. *** NOW... I have plans to cut my bill with Comcast to $50 a month if we can get by on 6/1 bandwidth. And so far its looking good. Quote Overall my bills today for Cable TV, Phone, Cell Phone, and Internet are: And after this weekend if all is well with testing on 6/1 bandwidth, I will drop the cost of all of this by doing away with Cable TV and 25/5 bandwidth for 6/1 bandwidth package for $49.99 a month to ( Internet, VoIP Phone, and Cell Phone Services ) to a total for all 3 services of just $95 a month for an additional savings of around $37 a month or $444 a year +/- the tax that seems wrong in that it is not a constant month to month. So before and after is: $266+/- a month to $95 +/- a month due to tax variations. So in the last 5 years I dropped my cost for all these services by $171 a month which comes out to $2052.00 a year in savings. And that is a sweet chunk of change and sadly that savings just barely offsets everywhere else that people are getting bent over in food prices for $7 a LB Hamburger Meat and $17 steaks, and almost $4 a gallon fuel prices.Hope if works for you. For benefit of others living in western USA. Compare High Speed Internet Providers & Special Offers: Cable, Dialup, Satellite & DSL Providers The information is dated, but is a starting point for others looking for the best deals. Unfortunately, high speed, reliability and low cost do not come together in many parts of the western USA. Too many places are spread outside of the urban limits. DSL ends up costing about $30 a month and you have to buy a router. And seldom, if ever, get 3 Mbps downloads. And you phone is $25 more. And Cable nis another $35 for basic. Fiber is a fantasy. Today I have learned some initialisms that Brits use about fibre internet. I won't call them acroynyms because they don't make pronounceable words They are FTTN (Fibre To The Node) and FTTH (Fibre To The Home). My service is FTTN (Fibre to a "node" then coax the last few yards) whereas the rival is fibre all the way, but with a potential large installation charge. It seems my FTTN provider has leap frogged the other guys and is planning 350/35 service for not much more that I am paying now for 120/12. Personally I think it's getting a bit crazy. 350/35 .... unless you have servers that are hosting content for others or sharing that bandwidth among all customer rooms of a large hotel with high speed in every room it seems like overkill. Quote Personally I think it's getting a bit crazy. I agree even though I wish I had that kind of bandwidth, ( just to have it ) even though I cant imagine flooding 350/35. I think the closest ever to flooding my 25/5 was when I was downloading 4 distros of Linux at the same time which were like 4.3GB each + playing online gaming + listening to Detroit 89X FM streaming + daughter was watching Netflix on TV and wife was on her computer on youtube video learning a new sewing technique. I know that 6/1 from 25/5 will be way different when it comes to distro downloads, but I can be patient and perform them during non-peak bandwidth needed times such as set the download and call it a night and wake up to a new ISO to burn and try out etc. *** I think my biggest fear for internet access is that at some point if they ever implemented a usage fee on top of the standard service fee that would really suck. Back when I had dial-up I was lucky that in my state (NH) AOL was a local call and the telephone company at the time didnt charge a usage fee on local calls. My brother who still lived with my parents in Vermont were under a different set of rules and so they were charged the same for local call to AOL dial-up + a fee based on how long the line was in use.I once bought a 40 mega byte hard drive. Thought it would be a long time before I needed anything else. EDIT: Never mind. Below is relevant to USERS Down Under. from http://www.afr.com/p/technology/american_experts_query_fibre_to_815VYwhw6vko8nvWpJ9CAL Quote The Gillard government’s decision to lock in fibre to the home technology for the majority Australians has been questioned by United States experts, as the debate over the contentious $37.4 billion project intensifies in the lead up to the federal election. Quote Under Labor’s broadband POLICY, 93 per cent of Australian homes and businesses will get fibre-to-the-premises technology as Telstra’s copper network is gradually replaced over the next decade. The technology is capable of delivering speeds of up to one gigabit per second. The remaining 7 per cent of the population will be covered by fixed wireless or satellite services.Now that is being questioned. Who needs gigabit service in the home? Quote A recent European Commision study found that 82 per cent of EU citizens who have broadband internet access at home are unwilling to pay more for a faster connection. Nearly half cited price as their top consideration.Huh? I though glass was cheaper than copper. Quote I once bought a 40 mega byte hard drive. Thought it would be a long time before I needed anything else. Yah I was thinking same thing after I posted that. My thoughts were the 640k saying though..LOL *At least for now its overkill, come 5 years from now it may be appropriate for increased data consumption with higher complexity data transfers bloating up in size such as if they even implemented Netflix 3D for example |
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