[UFO Chicago] OT--ISP Recommendations?

[Greg Groth]

On 5/4/2011 9:39 AM, Neil R. Ormos wrote:
> Christopher D. Heer wrote:
>> Neil R. Ormos wrote:
>>> Although there appear to be some good fixed wireless ISPs
>>> in the Fox Valley and the North Suburbs, I haven't found
>>> any that serve residential customers in my area.
>> I used a fixed wireless ISP up here for a couple of years
>> and have checked into others.  All the ones I looked at do
>> employ some kind of throttling, depending on your overall
>> usage and/or tower usage.
> Where is "up here"?
>
>> Also, after about a year and a half, I started having some
>> kind of interference that would kill my bandwidth.
>> Multiple service calls were unable to determine the
>> source, and eventually I had to just bail and go to AT&T.
>> (In fairness, the customer service from the provider --
>> dls.net -- was utterly outstanding; far better than
>> anything I've ever seen with the big ISPs.  They just
>> couldn't fix my problem.)
> DLS used to have coverage along I-90/I-290/SR-53 around
> Schaumburg, Arlington Heights, etc.  Unfortunately, they
> have apparently abandoned that part of the market in favor
> of greener pastures out west.
>
> I have only found one fixed wireless vendor that serves my
> area, and they are targeting the T-1 replacement market at
> nearly $300/month.  I was hoping someone here would know of
> some others.
>
>> Now with the bandwidth caps I've been searching for an
>> alternative, but I'm coming up empty, so I'll be very
>> interested to hear if others have alternative suggestions.
> In former-SBC territory, there appear to be several vendors
> that sell DSL service and claim to have no cap.  For
> shared-line ADSL service, which requires that you keep your
> AT&T plain old telephone service (POTS), prices start around
> parity with AT&T ($36-40 for nominal 6 mbps service) and go
> up.  In most cases, the carrier does not disclose whose
> DSLAMs are being used.  I found one vendor which offered
> service via AT&T's DSLAMs for $40/mo and COVAD's DSLAMs for
> $50/mo.  Dry-loop ADSL, which does not require working POTS,
> appears to start around $90/mo for nominal 6 mbps service.
>
> As you might expect, the bushel of additional services
> (e.g., e-mail, Usenet, etc.), and the quality of tech
> support, vary among vendors.
>
> I'll post a capsule of what I've found in a day or two.
> Perhaps after I consult the LUNI list and clean up after the
> inevitable flames and floods.
>
> --Neil

I've been using Cyberonic for more years then I can remember, somewhere 
close to ten now?  I live about 2 1/2 miles straight west of the Golden 
Nugget at Irving & Austin, so I can't say if their services are 
available in the suburbs.  No throttling that I've been aware of, no 
download limits, no port blocking, and they let me run commercial 
websites on a residential connection with their blessing.  Calls to tech 
support have always been answered by knowledgeable people that 
understand what ping & traceroute are, don't question my findings, and 
don't tell me to "hit the start button and click reboot".  I think I've 
had perhaps 4 outages since I've been dealing with them, never longer 
than a couple of hours, except the time they were updating the DSLAMs, 
and had to send out a new router, during the switchover I was down for 
36 hours.

http://www.cyberonic.com/

YMMV

Best regards,
Greg Groth