[Leaplist] Brighthouse or Embarq?

[John Simpson]

On 2007-12-12, at 1200, Kevin Anderson wrote:
>
> You could also consiter HughesNet (or DirectWay).  They're satellite  
> based,
> but I'm told they show suprisingly low latency, and I have used a  
> Vonage
> phone across their connection in other campgrounds with no significant
> problems.

i've had to move several of my commercial clients off of these  
satellite-based services. the bandwidth wasn't too bad, but having a  
first hop of 900ms when you leave the house can be a killer when  
you're trying to serve web pages or set up VPNs for traveling  
employees to connect back into the office. for a home user, whose  
primary activities involve downloading and reading email, and where  
delays of 2-3 seconds are okay, it might not be a bad deal.

speaking from experience... what we now call "embarq" used to be  
"sprint local". and i wouldn't recommend "sprint local" service to  
anybody. they were my local carrier when i lived in altamonte, and the  
fact that they had ZERO customer service after 7pm really irritated  
me- i had no choice other than to move out of their territory, they  
knew i was a "captive customer" and they treated me as a prisoner.

although i will admit, for commercial connections (T1 and larger) they  
do a really good job. one of my clients is an office building down in  
naples, they have a 10Mb fiber connection from embarq and have had  
ZERO problems since it was installed.

i'm using brighthouse right now- they do offer higher bandwidth than  
DSL, and you can call for customer or technical support 24/7. my only  
complaint with them is that they don't announce maintenance activities  
to their customers. they just cut the service off for ten minutes to  
four hours in the middle of the night with no warning, and for  
somebody like me who works from home at night, that's a major  
interruption (it literally shuts me down for the night.) i think if  
they were to set up a mailing list to announce maintenance activities,  
it would help a lot- at least if i KNEW that the service would be down  
on a certain night, i wouldn't promise to do mail server upgrades for  
clients in other parts of the world and then not be able to do them.

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| John M. Simpson    ---   KG4ZOW   ---    Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                         <jms1 at jms1.net> |
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