In an all too familiar game, I am stuck playing the card that I do not wish to play. This morning I called in a work order to have my Internet service provider (ISP) changed from AT&T Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) to Cox Cable. Before you get too excited that I have finally seen the light and come over to the cool side I should explain this is not the first time I have been with Cox. I have been around the Internet since I was on bulletin boards back in the early 90’s. My first direct Internet experience was through Telnet in 1994 when we were stationed at Luke AFB in Phoenix, Arizona.
You may be asking yourself why I switched in the first place. Well as you all know we have very few choices when it comes to broadband Internet. We have our phone company or our cable company and that is it. If one of them makes you mad, you only have one other place to go. I live in an older neighborhood where the infrastructure is crumbling beneath us. Our phone lines are 50+ years old and our cable lines date back to the 1980’s. This is just another reason we plan on moving in the next two years. Back to the subject. When we moved to the Oklahoma City area in 1999 we had then Southwestern Bell DSL. The service was decent most of the time but then when they would go down, we could never get in touch with technical support because of their terrible automated phone system. A person wants to scream about 15 minutes into the circle of death pressing 1 for English and 2 for Spanish and so on…
What is a person to do? Switch to the competitor, Cox Cable. I did this around 2002 and again I was pleased for a while before we have the same failures. Again, we have some very old infrastructure both inside the house and outside. After losing connections over and over again, we switched back to AT&T in 2006 knowing what we were getting ourselves into. I must say this time the service was much better than before and hey! My old phone number was available that I had when I was a kid so I chose it. The service was outstanding up until a couple months ago and now we are losing service left and right. Before you say anything, I know the problem is outside my house because I disconnected all wiring from inside the house and then connected the modem directly to the box outside the house.
Once again, what is a person to do? Go to the competitor Cox Cable. This is the only recourse that we have when the system is not working. I know many of you are saying… Why would you ever go to DSL when you could have cable? Cable is faster than DSL in almost every case! Well, this may be true in theory but for the average user, you cannot tell the difference in performance.
I have six computers on my network and one of them streams audio 24 hours a day. There are three hard wired desktops and three laptops. Heck there are seven if you count my phone that also uses wifi for my unlicensed mobile access (UMA). My son uses Bit Torrent (legally) because he has a band with his friends. In addition I have tested my network running Skype video on two computers, and streaming video on Ustream.com at the same time.
With all this running simultaneously, our network runs flawlessly on the AT&T Elite DSL. This Elite plan is supposed to supply up to 6 mega bits per second (Mbps) and I have tested around 5.4 Mbps at the best. The cable plan that I am subscribing too is a 12 Mbps and I have had the 10 Mbps before. My dad already has the 12 Mbps cable and it is very good. One thing that is worthy of pointing out, it does not matter if you have 8,000 Gbps fiber optic cable going to your house, if the web site on the other end is bogged down, the page is not going to load any faster. This is something that some people do not understand. If you are sharing files (legally) and 100 people are downloading the same file, you are going to get a slow download even if you have broadband. The point in all this is that for the average user, the difference between DSL and Cable is negligible. I came to this realization years ago so the supposed improved performance of cable is barely even noticeable to the average user.
There was another reason this time for the switch. The telephone number that I now have is the same number that my parents had when I was a kid. Unfortunately these numbers are assigned a three digit prefix that are assigned to AT&T for Del City. If I were to move to another suburb in the Oklahoma City metro, I could not take this number with me. By porting it over to Cox telephone, then I can take it with me as long as I stay within the 405 area code. This means if I move to Midwest City, Moore, Oklahoma City or anywhere else in the metro, I can keep my childhood phone number.
And finally there is one more reason for changing. In December 2007 we had an incredible ice storm as you may remember in my post on December 11, 2007. This storm damages power lines all over the metro including cable lines. The last couple of months I have noticed Cox cable running brand new lines in my neighborhood. I am not sure if this has anything to do with repairing the old and damaged lines or if there is an actual upgrade that would enhance the performance. In either case, it is certain to be new infrastructure that will help eliminate connection drops. The old lines were silver, likely aluminum lines while now there are black thick lines.
I hope this helps to explain my reasoning for the switch this time. The change will not actually happen until next week. This is one of the reasons that I use my own domain and a web based email as my email account. This way, if I change, it is transparent to those on the outside. I never give or even use the email given to me by my ISP. I am anxious to see how well the new service will work. I am pretty sure that it will be more dependable if for no other reason the new cable lines being installed. They have already upgraded the ones behind my house. I look forward to trying some bandwidth tests with some of you online.
Tags: AT&T, Cox, Internet, ISP, Technology