What are the best deals in the continental US for DSL or Internet cable these days? Planning to switch to DSL this month as my trading business expands and I need more reliability. Although my dial-up has been pretty good, a faster bandwith may not be a bad idea after all. Any ideas? TIA.
My experience is you either get reliability and good customer service and not the LOW LOW price, or you get the LOW LOW price and headaches. If you are trading for a living, you need data that is just there, period. What if it costs you $10 more a month..so what. To that end I recommend Speakeasy.net. They aren't in every city but you will find, if you do some searches, that they are very reliable and fast. I have 1.5m down and 384k up for $69 per month and it's solid and fast. There are cheaper companies, but I've found many of them to not be reliable. Also, ISP is their only business and it shows. Here's a great site for reviews. http://www.dslreports.com/ good luck, jd
I use Road Runner by BrightHouse (formerly Time Warner Cable). It is quite reliable and customer service is adequate when needed. The cost is about $40 to $50 a month but well worth it. And you don't tie up your phone line so that makes it even a better comparison. It is so much faster and reliable that I'd never settle for dial-up again except as a back-up. If you bundle it with your regular cable you can get some deals.
COMCAST CABLE beats the hell out of DSL/ They also have an introductory offer of $19.95 for the first 6 months, without the mandatory one year contract that DSL providers like SBC demand. DSL is also quite a bit slower than typical cable providers. If you are 14,000 feet from the telco switching office, you aren't gonna get anything more than 650kbps on the download with DSL. Meanwhile, COMCAST cable is getting me 1700kbps on the download. It's no contest! By the way, how can you even try to trade via dial-up? www.dslreports.com
Where do you get THAT deal with Comcast? In Denver, it's $29.99 for 3 months, then $52.99 thereafter.
It's true about the distance from the switching office with DSL. But cable companies doing internet is far from perfect either. First off, unless you pay extra, you don't get a static IP address with cable, it's DHCP, which means your IP changes from time to time. This can be a problem for some people. Another thing is, I don't know about Comcast, but some cable companies don't want you to share your internet connection with other computers in your home. They want you to pay extra if you hook up WiFi to your cable modem and run that connection on your laptop etc. Speakeasy actually encourages you to do this. Also, unless you buy Comcast's Cable TV service, they want to charge you $55 per month for their internet service, plus you must buy your own modem. Another thing, with Speakeasy, you have dailup service included as an alternative anywhere in the country if you need it while traveling or for backup. And as far as speed goes, like I said my connection is 1.5 mbs down and is always thus. With cable, you are sharing your bandwidth with either nobody, if you are the only subscriber in a block or two, or any number of people. This can considerably slow down your data bandwidth. Like I said, DSL isn't perfect either, and Comcast may be the better of the cable internet providers. But there are quite a few cable companies out there that may not have the expertise to pull off being a reliable ISP. So read those reviews people jd
I have both cable and DSL. Cable seems to be more reliable, and definitely faster. They each cost about $50/mo. Cash
Yes, you can. I have rarely ever had any problems with my providers (Earthlink or Concentric) and I am not a scalper so the speed is of no issue. My bigger problem has always been the IB connectivity rather than the Internet connection per se. But since I am expanding, increasing the number of contracts and starting trading new, Euro, markets, I need something that provides more bandwith than a dial-up. Thanks for all the comments again.
Find yourself a Belkin 4-Port Cable/DSL Router for about $39.95 after rebates and install this as well. It will give you a hardware firewall with NAT and SPI. Your IP address is essentially hidden from hackers, and you also avoid all of those annoying pop-up ads. Again, COMCAST is super fast and very reliable. I really don't think that you need a static IP for any of your work, and they have no idea if you hook-up more than one PC should you use a 4-Port Router.