After moving from Washington DC to Columbus Ohio, I have noticed quite a few differences in how ISPs treat their customers. In Columbus, for high speed Internet, you primarily have two choices. One being WOW! and the other being TWC. Most people don't switch Internet service providers this fast nor do they always find some huge flaw in the service being provided. So in my almost 50 days of living in Columbus, I'm going to be telling you how I've ended up on TWC from WOW! and how problems like these can be solved by allowing customers to bring their own device!
1. WOW! An Internet service provider that my family has used for quite a while before we moved. Back then, we used an Ethernet connection for two desktop PCs and the service was flawless. Fast forward 5 years and you have WOW! automatically giving customers a wireless router built in to their modem. One thing that I will say before I continue, is that I haven't had service related issues prior to switching to our own router. Not only was our internet traffic being throttled, but their own router actually prevented devices from being able to connect! Plus, probably the worst or most annoying thing about the service was the slow downs when connecting another WiFi device to the router. The most annoying time when this happened was when my Nexus 7 was downloading the latest nightly to Carbon ROM with F2FS (Highly recommended for 2012 Nexus 7 users) at 2.1 Mb/s, then I connected my One X to the router (No Internet traffic on the One X) and the download speed slowed down to about 60 kB/s. That's a speed decrease that anyone will notice, technology savvy or not. So the wireless was disabled by calling WOW! and we plugged in our own wireless router, speed decreases rarely existed but have shown us that their service was part of the problem.
2. TWC or Time Warner Cable, an ISP that probably most of America is familiar with. Their service so far is very reliable, however, when you plugin your our wireless router, your speeds maybe capped at 10 Mbps. No kidding. They give their customers a wireless router built into the modem, and the router completely blows chunks. If you try to connect to the router, it does not give the device internet access. At all! Plus, in order to disable it, you must call TWC for the user name and password. But back on the 10 Mbps cap I've noticed. My mother pays good money for their service, and it should just be provided without any restrictions on what router we use to provide Internet from the modem. But if you plug in a router into the modem that has a built in router, your speeds maybe capped at 10 Mbps. But this wasn't the case when the service was first installed, my first speed test gave the promised 50 Mbps, but has the days continued of using TWC's modem and router and having that plugged into our router, the speeds reached the 10 Mbps came that the modem had in place. But the way how I learned this cap existed was reading the modem's manual and seeing how our router was only receiving 10 Mbps of Internet. Now let's do some math here, 10 Mbps of 50 Mbps is 1/5 of the promised speed. And 1/5 of the $65 my mother pays is $12. But, no, she pays for 50 Mbps, it should be 50 Mbps regardless of what router we use.
No comments:
Post a Comment