How Plug-in-Play is High-Speed Internet Connectivity?

I've had fairly good service with Charter. We live in a end of the county town and the 5 Mb cable modem is slow at times but not to bad. I have been spoiled when I worked at Intel and had them as my ISP ( for work purposes ). Worked nights so late nights on days off had all three T3 servers to surf with. That is spoiled.

Brad

Most of my experiences with ISP's has been mixed. When you live in town and have more options you generally get better service... but I have found that if you have very limitted options for high speed (such as in my case) the quality of service deteriorates.

The two prime examples of non performers I have are a 2 way satalite system that I used for 3+ years and a 2 way wireless service that I paid for for 3 months and got 1 month of service from it.

Two way satalite is fairly decent for speeds but the latency is terrible and weather be it space or terrestrial often plays havoc with the system. Bad weather in any of the links of the satalite system (at your home, satalite issues, or bad weather at the location of where the signal rejoins the terrestrial network) will make the system unusable.

Two way wireless was pretty good when i first got it. Pretty fast speeds and reliable until all the wireless networks in our area started having problems. It is my personal theory that with all the wireless towers popping up in our area the network got clogged up with "ringing" between towers from hosts looking for the shortest route to wherever they were trying to reach. This ringing essentially overloaded the networks making them unusable. Top this off with your ISP INSISTING the problem is on your end it gets pretty frustrating. I wound up paying for 3 months of service and the last 2 months I was unable to use it at all. The ISP would not refund me anything for this as I had signed a service agreement where the ISP essentially says I pay and they promise nothing in terms of speed, performance or even availability.

With the new G3 phones and similar internet providers I think this will be the immediate future. Plug and play internet wherever you go Via a cellular service. Unfortunately where we live we are just outside the coverage area:(