Local cable isp (Adelphia) vs Verizon DSL

[Dman877]

We have been using adelphia cable for about 3 years here because we have no alternative. For the first year and a half or so the service was horrible, off and on all the time, 6 weeks waiting for service, etc. We have had no real problems for the last year though. I can download at 350+ kbps from good sites, ping in games is 50 - 100. Anyway Verizon DSL just became available here. We pay about 45$ for adelphia and verizon is supposed to be 29.95. Anyone here comment on verizon service? any hidden charges?

 

[JBT]

I have Verizon it is great, speed isn't that good only 1.5 Mbit 128 up but It never goes down either. It is probably only $29.95 the first 3 months and after that it is $34.95. no hidden charges though u will have to pay probably 13 bucks or something to ship the DSL modem. I have considered switching to Charter Cable because they have faster speeds but I had them before and they had pretty bad reliability so I have stuck to my guns with VZ and have proven to be VERY reliable and inexpensive. I'f you don't mind sacrificing some speed for the reliabilty and price then go for it.

 

[Dman877]

Well I download many large (160mb is average for a 2 hour track I download) files so speed is a concern. I don't upload much of anything though. How is your ping in games?

 

[JBT]

Its ussually in about 60ms I don't play that much so I will check in a bit =)

 

[Gouv]

I had Roadrunner (Time Warner), but I live in a large apartment building and the speed just tanked after coming back to school from winter break. It was so bad that AIM couldn't connect sometimes. So I switched to Verizon because it just became available in my area.

I have 1.8Mb/s down 160Kb/s up, which is fast enough. Actual speed is in that neighborhood (~200KB/s down). The good thing is that I always have consistant speed. Pings are also extremely fast. Playing on battle.net with Roadrunner was terrible, but Verizon is really fast (~30ms ping).

 

[nageov3t]

I've had both Verizon DSL (at home) and Adelphia Cable (while at college, living off-campus)...

Verizon seems to be a bit slower, but we had tons of problems with Adelphia. I don't know if it was just bad customer support or if they were hating on us because it was a house full of college students, but the service went down at least once every few months, and stayed down for a few days while they tried to get a tech guy out to come visit us.

 

[Mday]

Adelphia is horrible. Verizon is bad.

Verizon > adelphia anyday.

with dsl, you get more consistent speeds. with cable, you get higher speeds, but consistency is not as good. with adelphia, it's usually utter crap.

 

[tallman45]

DSL is usually slower than cable but more than acceptable. The $29.99 is for the first 3 months then it is $34.99 after that . Depending on how many phones/fax/alarm/utility phone jacks that you have you may spend up to $10 extra for each filter. Taxes/FCC line charges may also apply to DSL, you have to check into that.

FYI, I have Optimum Online and they are awesome, plus I called and told them I was going to switch to Verizon DSL because they were only $34.99 vs $44.99, presto, they dropped my price to $35 for the next 6 months.

 

[nageov3t]

when we got Verizon DSL, they gave us a bunch of the filters for free... the only pain is that they prevent some phones from being hooked right on top of the phone jack

 

[farscape]

Never have had a prob with adelphia (Western NY). Got an email whenever there was going to be an outage for upgrades, and that was twice in the last year and a half. Might of had a hard time on email 2-3 times in that time - an hour total(?). Consistantly high throughput - 350+ on average, and sometimes all the way up to 480 - 490.

 

[Technonut]

Adelphia has been great for me... Good enough to get rid of my landline telephone to use Packet8 VoIP..

 

[mbackof]

I've had (initially Prestige) Adelphia on and off for the past 4 years and recently it has been good. I get fast download speeds and its up all of the time. Forget about service if you have a problem beyond changing a password. It is especially bad if you need service in Maryland for the wire/hardware work. They contract out the connections and installs and the Adelphia group works on the outside boxes. So basically if you have a problem, they send a contractor 3 or 4 times, he cannot figure it out or he tells you that it might be a problem with the outside box, then they don't report back any findings and they send out another contractor who tells you the same thing. They insist that you have to be home and they constantly miss appointments without calling. They don't let you call the local offices either, you have to visit. When they dispatch the Adelphia technicians those guys do a good job, but they are few and far between and the main office doesn't like to send them to your house. Why do I still have them? They are my only option other than DirecTV, and the satellite is too expensive. I would go with Verizon.

Mike

 

[Jeraden]

I had Adelphia cable modem service here in Pittsburgh for over a year. It was horrible. Sometimes download speeds would be decent, other times it would be ridiculously slow, as in about 100kbps. I always attributed it to the internet, that some sites are just inherantly slower than others. My biggest complaint about Adelphia was packetloss that they wouldn't fix that made playing many online games impossible. About 6 months ago or so Verizon DSL finally became available in my area, so I switched to that as it was cheaper, plus it couldn't really be any worse than Adelphia.

Now I'm in love with it. Rarely is the service down, it was down more frequently with Adelphia. Pings are good, not significantly better than Adelphia but no worse. Packetloss is 0% so I can finally play online games again. And the best is I get 160K/s downloads (whatever that equates to in kbps) from pretty much everywhere. I realized my belief that some sites are just slower than others was pretty much unfounded and it was just that Adelphia completely sucked. That alone makes it all worth it, but the icing on the cake: Lots of binary newsgroups with about 1 week retention. Adelphia had a few that had like 12 hour retention it seemed as you could never find anything without missing parts. Verizon is newsgroup bliss.