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Cable Providers Top Telecom Rivals for Internet Reliability25
Postedby msmash from the surprising-everyone dept.
A new study of broadband reliability finds a top-two finish that you might not expect from recent surveys of ISP customer satisfaction: Charter's Spectrum and Comcast's Xfinity, the two largest cable operators in the US. From a report: Opensignal's report, published Thursday, draws on software telemetry collected from April 1 through June 29 of downtime, consistency of service, and how well a provider meets basic thresholds for speed, latency, and other core performance metrics. Spectrum comes in first with a "Reliability Experience" score of 741 out of 1,000, followed by Xfinity with 710, Verizon with 625, AT&T with 546, and T-Mobile with 525. Opensignal chose those five companies to study because each passes more than a third of US homes.
But while Comcast and Charter employ the same basic cable architecture except for a few fiber-to-the-home pockets, Verizon and AT&T have mixed networks. That includes extensive and growing fiber service but also fixed 4G and 5G wireless from Verizon and hybrid-fiber broadband from AT&T, both of which lack fiber's speed and capacity advantages, plus obsolete DSL connectivity. T-Mobile's home connectivity, meanwhile, is almost exclusively fixed wireless.
Cable Providers Top Telecom Rivals for Internet Reliability More| ReplyLogin
Mixing different systems (Score:3)
by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Thursday August 29, 2024 @03:42PM (#64747024)
It would be more helpful if they looked at reliability by system. It doesn't make sense to compare cable to AT&T DSL if the actual choice in your area is cable vs. fiber. For what it's worth, my AT&T fiber connection has never gone down in 4 years (despite some extended power outages and hurricanes). My old Comcast cable internet went down a few times a year.
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Re: (Score:2)
by pixelpusher220 ( 529617 )
Hell Comcrap would go down *daily* for us. Not long enough to make a call but enough that streaming stopped and browsing halted.
Just ridiculous to claim Comcast is any sort of 'reliable'
Re: (Score:2)
by dgatwood ( 11270 )
Hell Comcrap would go down *daily* for us. Not long enough to make a call but enough that streaming stopped and browsing halted.
Just ridiculous to claim Comcast is any sort of 'reliable'
Daily would be nice. Not a single video chat goes by where I don't have to ask someone to repeat something because of a 10- to 15-second period of total data loss. Meanwhile pings to 8.8.8.8 go through just fine, so they're doing some sort of very, *very* broken QoS mismanagement or per-stream throttling. On business-class cable service.
The day that either the regional wireless service or Starlink adds static IP support, Comcast is gone.
Re: (Score:1)
by jjbenz ( 581536 )
I can concur, my AT&T connection has gone down 2 times that I can remember over the past 10 years. Both of the times it was down was less than a half hour. The people in my area that user Charter/Spectrum are not so lucky. There have been times over the past 5 years that charter was down for multiple days.
So in complete fairness (Score:1)
by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
I'm pretty sure dead pigeons top most telecoms in reliability.
There are two things that have reliability. The first is landing airplanes because if you co*ck that up the other airlines lose money and so then you're costing rich people money. The second is stock trading because again you're costing rich people money when you mess that up.
For anything that matters to you and me good enough is always good enough
reliability (Score:3)
by ole_timer ( 4293573 ) on Thursday August 29, 2024 @03:50PM (#64747038)
my verizon fios went down a fair bit a year ago (6-7 times), now it's rock solid
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Re: (Score:2)
by pixelpusher220 ( 529617 )
my FIOS has been pretty solid since coming back from Comcraptic. Was solid before too. Just playin the switcheroo dance between 'em.
No surprise (Score:3)
by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday August 29, 2024 @03:58PM (#64747060)
People get angry when their TV stops working. When I got my Internet via cable, they sent a technician next day when something was not working.
Now I have some more professional level Internet via Fiber. The provider is mainly targeting businesses, but does offer to private customers at something like 40% higher cost than the competition. Well worth the price, because you get the same support as the business customers. But go down to regular prices and you can wait a week until something happens.
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I experienced two outages with Comcast one year. (Score:2)
by mmell ( 832646 )
I switched to T-Mobile's wireless solution. Ping times are stable and okay at ~40ms (good thing I'm not a gamer), net speeds are about 1/3 what I was for the same money (?) at ~200Mbps/~20Mbps, more than adequate to support multiple video streams. 100% uptime for over two years now, thanks to a small battery UPS (my network's pretty reliable these days. Power, on the other hand . .
.).
Re: (Score:2)
by Local ID10T ( 790134 )
I have Comcast at home. It is very reliable. Gigabit service at a decent price. (The price dropped by 50% and the bandwidth went from 100mb to 1gb as soon as Starlink became available...)
I have Comcast at my business. It sucks. We lose connection multiple times a day (it dropped while I was typing this) and pay several times the price I pay at home for 1/10th the bandwidth. When the contract is up, I will be switching providers (thinking of going with Starlink
Strange how Comcast can have such va
Re: (Score:2)
by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 )
Yeah, I've experienced that as well. Even places seemingly close, I asked various technicians and they blamed various parts of the network for being old or crap. We had the same external to our building router or whatever replaced several times. Every time we complained they would replace the same dang part, stay for two seconds saw that some traffic was working across it and then leave. The problem never went away, we moved offices and a different problem showed up there. Meanwhile comcast/xfinity never c
Re: (Score:1)
by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 )
I switched to T-Mobile's wireless solution.
Don't know how much you're paying for what level of service, but Ting [tingmobile.com] uses T-Mobile (as well as others) and all their plans include hot spot -- and I think you can use a dedicated device for that too. I have Cox for my home phone, Internet and TV -- and it's been very reliable, but have Ting (over T-Mobile) for my phone using their Flex Plan -- $10/month for unlimited talk/text + $5/GB 5G data -- and my bill is $17.33/month. Other plans include bundles of 5G data. I rarely use any cell data, usually us
Re: (Score:2)
by azander ( 786903 )
I hat T-Mobile for over 2 years. When it was on the 4G network it was stable, reliable and had few issues. When they removed half the 4G radios on the tower and replaced them with 5G my, T-Mobile become total trash. VPN WILL NOT WORK on their 5G. They use Dual industrial-grade NAT and have it configured to change IP's every 3-5 seconds on the outbound side. I tested this from my ISP and from my end. VPN's won't handle such a fast switching without seriously compromising them. All T-Mobile has to do i
I've was in a WFH arrangement for several years (Score:2)
by mmell ( 832646 )
Sorry to hear your implementation has some pretty serious troubles. Mine's been flawless, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who are quite happy with the cable companies' product. FWIW, I still get the impression the survey they're referencing was jointly sponsored by Comcast and Charter Communications.
Let me guess: (Score:1)
by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 )
The cable companies paid for this survery, right?
LOL. When Comcast screwed the pooch last year, I finally had enough of them and switched to fiber from another company. Ridiculously faster than Comcasts sh*tty cable, symmetrical speed, and haven't had a single problem with it. Had to get email service elsewhere but that works out better for me in the long run anyway.
BTW I don't use Comcast for anything at all now. I have an antenna on the roof for TV. Cable companies can go f*ck themselves.Gaming (Score:2)
by RitchCraft ( 6454710 )
It all sounds like a game of Monopoly to me.
(Score:2)
by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 )
AT&T does not make interconnects unless it absolutely has to. As the descendant of a monopoly it has a very unhealthy approach to reliability because it eschews redundancy that cannot be provided internally. And their reliability numbers reflect their approach. This is why a building being blown up in Tennessee takes out all AT&T service in Georgia despite the fact that there is a major data exchange 2 blocks from the damaged building. AT&T didn't have any customers in the biggest data cente
Re: (Score:2)
by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 )
Argghhh: eschews redundancy unless it cannot be provided internally.
Cell Phones (Score:2)
by Fortnite_Beast ( 10429778 )
I can vouch for this article. I know my Spectrum mobile phone has better coverage and speed than my Verizon phone did.
Starlink has been rock solid for me so far... (Score:2)
by Papaspud ( 2562773 )
for what that is worth
Comcast must have pulled a VW (Score:1)
by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 )
Comcast had to have found a way to game the test like VW did with diesel emissions testing. I had Adelphia for a few years before Comcast bought them. Then was stuck with Comcast for over 10 years. There was never a day that Comcast didn't have a hiccup and very rarely a month that I didn't have at least a half hour of down time. On top of that I never got the advertised speed.If it was 50% of advertised, it was a good day. I also worked for an Alberta Canada based company. Comcast hated the city they were
YMMV (Score:2)
by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 )
Due to working from home, I have dual ISP's to mitigate downtime in the event one of them
drops or has upstream connection issues.Frontier Fiber and Xfinity Cable.
Hands down, Xfinity is the more stable / reliable of the two.
As much as folks like to hate on Xfinity, my connection rarely has issues whereas Frontier
seems to blow up at least once a month. Don't even get me started on the Act of God that
is required to get Frontier to fix something. After being out for almost two months, I had to
submit an FCC coQuit Comcast... went to Tmobile. It's been good. (Score:1)
by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 )
Comcast *KEPT* raising my rates and I still had hours of unscheduled downtime (some times an entire night from 2am to 6am). They were going towards $85 a month just for internet.
So I switched to T-mobile. I've had much less unscheduled downtime. And it's $55 a month with autobill... $50 for autodraft from my bank (which I don't feel comfortable with).
No wires. I've had 4 computers going when the grandsons are over and everything ran fine for Risk of Rain, Youtube, Minecraft, Gloomhaven, some Rogue L
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