Money Poll #11: Internet Access

Written by nickel - 12 Comments

On the heels of yesterday’s revelation that we won’t be able to easily (or inexpensively) get broadband internet access at our new house, I thought it might be interesting to run a poll on internet access. The question of the week is: “What type of internet access do you have at home?” As you probably know from my earlier post, we have broadband. After a long run with dialup, we jumped on the broadband bandwagon nearly four years ago when we signed up for cable internet through Comcast. We then switched to DSL about two years ago. So… How do y’all get your internet fix?

Published on May 8th, 2006 - 12 Comments
Filed under: Online, Polls
email this article - digg this - stumble it - save to del.icio.us

Did you find this article useful? If so, please sign up to receive e-mail updates:

Comments (scroll down to add your own):

I just recently moved. I used to use Time Warner cable, but my new house is serviced by Adelphia. It is better than dial up (especially since we don’t want to have a land line) but not as good as TW was. Time Warner is buying up all of Adelphia’s contracts, though; hopefully they take over in my town by early mid summer so that when football season starts I can get cable television installed. Adelphia is a lot more expensive than time warner.
Comment by Blaine Moore — May 8th 2006 @ 7:56 am
Since I work for a telco, I should tell you all that if you want DSL through your phone company, you can only get it if you live within about 1.5 miles of the central switching office. Any further than that, your signal will degrade or it’s completely unavailable. At that point, cable modem (ADSL) is probably your best bet, as long as you aren’t uploading files.

And as far as getting a land line, I highly recommend that folks keep a land line for dialing 911.
Comment by mapgirl — May 8th 2006 @ 8:53 am
Converted to Yahoo DSL a few months ago — love it!
Comment by FMF — May 8th 2006 @ 10:56 am
Using Verizon DSL here (the cheapo $15/month package). We’ve had a few annoying outages in the last six months, but they’ve all been on Friday nights so they didn’t affect us too much.
Comment by Nick — May 8th 2006 @ 11:46 am
After being a long time dialup customer we switched to Earthlink DSL last August. The revelation of going from never knowing if you will get online or how long it will take to always being online was breathtaking. I can not imagine dialup lasting much more than a few years once DSL prices are comparable to dialup. We went wireless several months ago letting us roam the house with our Powerbook.
Comment by Andrew — May 8th 2006 @ 2:12 pm
Verizon FiOS (Fiber optical)
Comment by Daytonscott — May 8th 2006 @ 2:12 pm
I think the poll should also reflect what kind of service we would like, i am stuck in DSL hell when i want cable. I guess i am lucky i at least have DSL.
Comment by Charles — May 8th 2006 @ 8:40 pm
Speakeasy DSL. Now that I’m in a place I know I’ll be staying long enough for a DSL contract, I finally got rid of the cable modem and the terrible service.

I’ve never been happier. Thank you, Speakeasy!
Comment by Matt — May 9th 2006 @ 3:00 am
I work in a library where we have broadband, and have a very cheap dialup ISP at home. I can tell you, if there is heavy internet traffic generally, or on the site you are visiting, the broadband isn’t that much faster than the 56K. I honestly don’t feel like I’m waiting that much longer for pages to load at home than I do at work. I’m sure I’d see more of a difference if I were trying to download videos or play online games, though.

I’d highly recommend http://www.freedomlist.com. It’s a site where you can search for free and cheap ISPs available in your area. It’s how I found mine–I’m only paying $56.40 a YEAR for 120 hours a month. Service has been fine.
Comment by EC — May 9th 2006 @ 9:05 am
I can’t even imagine getting stuck back on dial-up. I’d hate to add up the time wasted waiting for long load times.
Comment by Andrew - Money Supply & Debt Blog — May 9th 2006 @ 7:12 pm
I use cable Internet access. I just bought my first home and am adjusting to paying the mortgage and all utilities on my own for the first time now. I chose cable because of it’s speed, but also because there was no cost-savings benefit to me to go with DSL or dial-up. I had no intention of getting a landline phone, using only my cell. So basically I was looking at $55 per month for cable Internet, or adding a $35 phone line so I could pay $20 for DSL (same $55) or maybe slightly less for dial-up but not enough savings to make it worthwhile.

Anyone else feel a bit overwhelmed at times with the costs of all these technology fees? $60 per month for a decent DirecTV pacakge, $50 per month for cell phone, $55 per month for Internet access….it all adds up quickly. I like the idea of some of these advertised package deals I’ve heard about, but I have no doubt those are “introductory rates” that change after a few months and have huge fees to the point you wouldn’t be saving much in the end.
Comment by Brian — May 10th 2006 @ 3:10 pm
Brian,

I feel your pain on high technology fees. One thing you might check into is if your provider has “lite” cable internet service.

In Texas we have Time Warner (Road Runner), which I think is on the order of $40-50/month for standard cable internet service. However, there is an unadvertised “Road Runner Lite” which is about $25-30/month. (well, it wasn’t advertised in my area when I found out about it, but you can find out about it using Google now)

It is a bit slower than standard cable (I think approx 384K downstream), but much faster than dial-up and is still an “always-on” connection. I still download digital video/music and it’s very usable.

It didn’t require changing any of my equipment (e.g. cable modem). All it took was a phone call to downgrade my service and it saves us about $20 per month.

I took this approach because I got tired of chasing “introductory rates” which always ran out after 6 months or so.
Comment by Chris — May 10th 2006 @ 4:24 pm