While I am still working on my comprehensive comparison of all of the major Cumberland County Broadband providers, i think it’s important to share some of my experiences as they occur. Recently, one of my Fairfield Glade clients switched ISPs, and it gave me an opportunity to do a straight up, side by side comparison of the two services.
Now, I don’t want to through either of these companies under the bus. The truth is that both have their strengths and their weaknesses. However, after what happened with my client, I feel that it’s important to share this information.
First, some background. My client is a business on Peavine Road. They have 3 phone lines, (two for voice, 1 for fax), and high speed internet. They, like all businesses should, use their ISP for high speed internet and ONLY high speed internet, they use none for the ISP offered email, web-hosting, of other value-added services. My client was at the end of a multi-year agreement with their ISP/Phone Provider, and was looking for some alternatives. While cost was a factor in choosing to switch, there was also some service issues regarding internet speed especially in wet/rainy weather. Their current provider had tried on several occasions to address the problem, but no suitable solution had been found.
My client had been with Frontier Communications, and was coming to the end of their multi-year contract. We were approached by Comcast who gave us a proposal.
Of course, before the lines get installed, the numbers on paper are the first things to look at. On paper, the Comcast offer was widely better. For 3 phone lines, Unlimited US Long distance, and high speed internet, the average monthly cost would be around $135 per month on a two year agreement. The current agreement with Frontier, for 3 phone lines, 900 minutes of US LD, and high speed internet was $221 per month.
I would expect the two numbers to be within 10% of each other, but 61% is almost unconscionable on the part of Frontier. In fact at that rate it’s worth it to break a contract with Frontier to switch services, because you will get back your escape fees with the savings within a couple of months.
But numbers on paper are one thing, it remained to be seen how the service would perform. As I said, my client had issues with Frontier. We had talked with them on several occasions regarding weather related outages. I had even gone so far as to trace the problem back to a specific peace of equipment inside the Frontier system, but sadly being able to communicate my findings to Frontier proved fruitless.
On the switch over day I was on site to coordinate and I had the opportunity to test both the Frontier lines and the Comcast lines under identical circumstances. Our speeds with Frontier would sometimes get as low as 300k Down and 200k Up. The average packet loss would be 16% to 30%. On cutover day however, the Frontier speeds were better, but not as good as they could be.
For my speed testing I use Speakeasy’s Speedtest. There are many such speed testing systems out there, but when you are comparing different locations and ISP, it’s good to have a known baseline, and this happens to be my known baseline. Here are the numbers from screen shots I took before and after the cut over:
Frontier:
Comcast:
As you can see the numbers are absolutely staggering. There is a 15x increase in download speed and a 5x increase in upload speed.
In all fairness, my client will most likely never fully use that much speed. I could even make an argument that at 20,000 kpbs he is pulling pages of the web faster than most servers can feed them to him. But for that much speed for $90 less per month, switching is a no brainer.
We still need to build some history with Comcast. I have some reservation about dealing with a company that was the runner up in the 2008 Consumerist’s Worst Company In America Contest. Comcast also has a very bad reputation regarding bandwidth throttling, deceptive advertising, and penalizing users for unsubstantiated copyright violation claims. But for now I am willing to set that aside and deal with Comcast based on how they work with my client.
