Tennessee ISP's?

[troysvihl]

I know there are some people from Tennessee that post on this board regularily, so I was wondering who the company is and what kind of connection you use. Also, how much do you pay for the service?

[Carl Price]

I use Major Internet (a local Memphis ISP). It is a 56k dialup and they also have ISDN and full web hosting. If you want you can sign up online at http://www.mipro.net. They give great service and full range of newsgroups. It is $13.95 per month and they give you a month free for every referral and $1.00 a month towards your service for every month the referral stays and pays. Therefore my internet service is free (I have 18 referrals). If you do sign up please use 1014 as referrer.

[Edited by Carl Price on 09-10-2000 at 01:49 PM]

[SARGE]

http://www.thelist.com should provide you with numerous choices

[troysvihl]

Thanks Carl. I will use you as a referal if I do sign up.

But then again, I do owe Al Gore for inventing the internet, so maybe I'll give him my referal. lol

[Edited by troysvihl on 09-10-2000 at 02:43 PM]

[Xayd]

The only thing I recommend to people about ISP's after working for one is go local. The hop time across local pop to backbone link can be big with national ISP's, especially with worthless and crappy national ISP's like AOL. Local ISP's should generally be faster than national ISP's, all other things being equal (for 56k anyways).

Xayd

[troysvihl]

Thanks for all the info. That link was great sarge.

After looking at all the choices, I'm going to go with plain old Bell South. They have a deal on DSL lines. $40 a month, no other fees. Plus they throw in a modem. $40 a month was a bit more than I wanted to spend (I figured about $20/mo), but I really didn't want to use a normal 56k to play games online.(Knoxville isn't exactly brimming with ISP choices.) I've heard cable modems will be comming in Jan and they'll only be about $20 a month; so I only have to pay $40 for a few months anyway.

Do any of you play online with a cabal modem connection? How is it? I'm concerned about the uploading speed. If I'm not mistaken, cable modems use an ordinary phone line connection for uploading and the coaxial connection for downloading. Am I right? If I am, I would assume that for most internet stuff, it's really fast since your mostly downloading info rather than uploading. But if your playing games online, like unreal tournament, don't you use uploading as much as downloading? Wouldn't that make the phone line part of a cable modem system the bottle neck?

[Charliey]

Well around here the uploading is done on the cable, not on the phone line. I dont if its like that everywhere though.

[Xayd]

I don't know of any major cable service providers that use a standard dialup for uploads. 1 way satellite uses that, but that's another ballgame. Cable should be more synchronous than DSL (meaning the same speed up as down), BUT...

The variances in speed over the span of a day can be huge with cable, if the cable company oversells its network as most ISP's do. ADSL involves shared bandwidth as well, but past your local switch only. Telco's are guaranteeing a certain speed or they won't hold you to the contract for the modem and such.

My mom has cable up in the mountains where she lives, I have telco DSL. She sees variances in speed from 200k up/down at 3 am to 12k up/down at 4-6pm in the afternoon.

I get downloads in peak hours at 150k, uploads at 25k or so. In off peak hours I get downloads around 185k, and uploads around 35k.

And yes, I waste hours of my life away every day playing UT, and have bigger trouble with server bandwidth than my bandwidth. I ping fast servers in my region below 100, and pretty much all fast servers in the U.S. under 130.

If DSL works out for you, don't get cable. Cable is very iffy, depending on the provider IMHO.

Xayd

[troysvihl]

thanks for the tip. I'll stick with the DSL.