DSL in Houston

Trust Me RoadRunner is The Way to go. Ive Only had it for a month. During that time Ive downloaded almost a thousand songs,6 movies with speed like no other .DSL cant hang with RR .Downloading 3 movies at 100.00 Kbs each common .

DSL-$50.00(fast but not that fast)
RR-$45.00(so fast its scary)

follow your heart(lol)

 

Playa,

What side of town do you live on ? I don't live in Houston anymore but my dad does.Right now he is still on dial up but I've finally talked him into getting broadband.He is even paying for a 2nd phone line for his dialup

...anyway I was thinking he should go with dsl since he doesn't have cable ? Maybe RR is the good choice...What does it take for the installation and such ? Is RR a cable company or just an internet provider ?

 

RR is ran by Time Warner, same company that does cable television.

As for installation, its fairly easy. They set it up in your house less than a week after you called to order it. You get a free modem along with the installation, while with DSL, you have to buy the modem and have to sign a contract. With RR, there is no contract. I live in East Houston and have had RR for a year already and agree that its much better than DSL. I had DSL through work over here but our DSL provider went out of business. Havent been done but once and it was a modem issue. They replaced for free no problem. Other than that, its been great.

 

Relativist, have you tweaked your settings yet? You'd be surprised at how much of a difference it can make.

DSL will never be as fast cable, but cable is shared so during peak time, it could, theoretically be as slow. Just depends on your neighborhood.

 

Do you have to have cable tv in order to have cable internet ?

 

i think you pay $5 more if you don't

 

I think it's actually more severe than that. I remember, for some reason, that it's a better deal than xDSL if you already have cable, but that it's not if you don't.

 

Southeast Houston.Sorry for posting response so late

 

I think I've had maybe 4-5 hours of downtime in the 12 months I've had Road Runner. When I had DSL, I had about 4 weeks of downtime in 6 months. Time Warner is worth the extra $3 over Earthlink, just cause if you do have problems, you can go directly to the source, instead of Earthlink saying it's a cable/Time Warner issue, so we can't do anything about it. You can tell Time Warner to get it fixed or refund you for the downtime, or you'll cancel your account, etc.

B

 

Hastily, I ordered DSL for my apartment from SBC. They supposedly did some checks to find out if we were close enough to the central office to get DSL, and they gave us the "okay." I haven't tried it yet since they say it won't be swithced on until next week (Sept. 30).

Now I have just recently run across the site dslreports.com and found that you can use your address and tel # to look up the distance yourself. Lo and behold, according to the site I'm 3,000 feet too far from the closest central office to get "regular" DSL. Instead of "regular" DSL at maybe 1000 kbps, I'll probably be getting "IDSL," which according to the site is equivalent to having two ISDN lines, at 144 kbps. SBC failed to mention this, and on top of that I'll still be paying full price!

Wait...what's that I see?...it looks like...the future!....and I see....I see...cancellation of service!

Anyone else have a similar experience?

 

moomoo - you better cancel the order now or you will be stuck in a contract with a HUGE fee for getting out early.

 

Jeez, the EXACT thing happened to me. I was stuck for one year at 40 kb/s max! oh well, it was still better than the ISDN service I had that was 16-18 kb/s.
When I FINALLY got out of the contract I got earthlink cable that's provided by time warner. I never realized how fast cable was! 250-280 kb/s max. wow. And its actually a little cheaper than DSL! Oh yea, I had tons of problems with SBC DSL...but none with cable.

 

I am right there with Jeff. I had ev1 dsl and kept it until I finally pulled all of my hair out and looked basically like one of the guys on K-19. I switched to Roadrunner and wish I would have switched a long time ago. This thing hauls ass like a T-3 on Sosa Juice.

 

well, i haven't really physically signed anything. here's what i have already done:

first, i checked to see if i could get cable modem. nope. my apartment is serviced by optel cable, which sucks because they don't offer cable modem, and i don't even think they are called "optel cable" anymore. oh well.......

(BTW, does anyone know why people can switch phone companies regardless of where you live, but you are locked into a particular cable company depending on where you live? what up wid dat?)

sept. 10 -- my phone service was MCI, but they don't offer DSL (as far as I know?), so i called around and found out SBC offered DSL. they told me DSL was available to my home phone number. so i switched to SBC around september 10th and ordered DSL along with the phone service. they told me that DSL would be activated in my apartment on september 23.

sept. 16 -- i received all the DSL equipment from SBC via FedEx and hooked it all up.

sept. 23 -- the big day, right?! WRONG! no dsl signal detected when i tried to set it up.

sept. 24 -- called SBC to find out what was wrong. "the activation date has been pushed back to september 30 [which will make it three weeks from the time i placed the order to the time that it will be actiated, if further delays don't make it more]. i don't know why." ooooooohkay. whatever.

since, short of finding another place to live, i don't have cable modem as a choice, i really want to give this dsl a shot. however, do i still have time to get out of the contract if i don't like the dsl service i get? is there another step where i have to actually "sign" a contract? because i haven't actually signed anything yet...

 

Are you sure about the distance? Are you a total 3,000 feet from the central office? If you are, thats pretty good. 3,000 feet from the CO is not bad at all. When I had DSL, I was 18,250 FT FROM MY CLOSEST CO and was connected at 200kbps.

 

I think he said he was 3000 feet too far meaning he's probably something like 18k - 21k feet away from his closest CO. That's why they're having to use IDSL to provide him with DSL service. Both places I had DSL, I was about 4k feet away from the CO and the speeds and service were reilable.

 

Yeah, that's what I meant to say, 3000 feet past the technical limit of around 17k-18k ft according to dslreports.com, which puts me around 20k-21k ft from the CO.

Don't I wish I was only 3000 ft away from the CO. Anyway, I won't find out how well the service actually works until Monday...I'll post an update then just in case anyone finds this info useful.

Here's something else I was wondering about...You know the disclaimer that they have about how the actual distance can be different than the estimated distance they give such as on dslreports.com? The way I see it (this is a guess, totally uninformed), the actual distance can never be less than the estimated distance they give, can it? I'm guessing that the estimated distance is a physical ground-based measurement of the distance from the CO to your address. If so, then this would be the absolute minimum required cable length from the CO to your address, would it not? Any loops, detours, etc. that the cable path happens to take would only make the actual distance that much more than the estimated distance. Any DSL/Telecom experts or pseudo-experts out there know if this is true or not? I'm hoping beyond hope that maybe, just maybe, the actual distance from the CO to my address will somehow turn out to be less than the estimated distance from dslreports, but I suspect that it's just the opposite...

 

Roadrunner, stop thinking and just do it!

 

I don't even want to share my story, just painful.

OK, not really, but it was very annoying. I was told that I could have it and then couldn't have it about 6 different times before I told them to **** off, I ain't getting it even if I can. RM95's Girl's apartment is now my office.