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In the long run i don't think it will matter once fiber optics becomes more wide spread and people have the option. I saved $5/month by switching and now there is no such thing as peak usage time. I get 15 Mbps downloads and 2 Mbps uploads no matter what time of day it is. If you can get that for the same or less why not.

Maybe true, but in many areas Fiber is not offered yet. I was living in the metro Atlanta area and I could not get it! I had the fastest speed that Comcast offered in my area though. So it could be YEARS before some people see fiber. I live out in hillbilly land now, north of Augusta. And going back to DSL from Cable is like going back to dial-up. My provider says that fiber has not even been talked about in my area, actually said i was the first customer to ask that question!

Fiber would fix a lot of speed issues but if you live in a rural area like most of the US is rural than fiber would be very expensive. Cable has been around since the early 80s in most areas, phone line for more than a century so using these existing lines makes the cost go down for the provider. In an urban area I would expect to see fiber be put in place faster because the ISP can make their investment back quicker.

At least you have DSL. My parents live 6 miles north of a town of 2,000 people. You have to go 25 miles further north before you get to the next town with a population over 100. So my parents are stuck on dial up and afaik there is no talk of being able to get DSL, no chance at all of cable, leaving only satellite left. That isn't an option because of the crazy high costs, crap bandwidth, and huge latency.

Thats why I said "in the long run" and "when it becomes more available". Luckily I was one of the first places to get it and it has been here for quite some time, Verizon began offering a discount to switch from DSL to FIOS. So obviously I jumped on that and saved $5 a month.

-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uhomvtcFLg This surely will hurt comcast when it becomes more available -> It would cost my $15/month more to have this verse my 15mbps I have now

SNG, why not run them on a laptop with a cellular card

We used satellite when I was in Iraq. The problem there was there were too many users. If you just use it for yourself and 1 or 2 others, the speed isn't bad.

Oh, lol. Cell phone reception is about like those 'can you hear me now' type things, it depends on where you are standing in the yard, and at what angle you are tilting the phone.

Ouch!

Well if they stop P2P nosense to have so much downloading speed 100Mbps with fiber and 100Mbps fiber upload for the internet. I pay a lot for 40Mbps down.. Don't know about the rest of you here.

You can get FIOS 20mbps down/ 20mbps up internet + over 200 digital channels TV service + phone line for $100 a month here

I pay $135 for 3Mbps down/256kbps up, ~60 analog cable channels, 8HD Digital channels, Starz Superpack (comes with the package) which is digital, but I don't even get Starz HD, and phone (no long distance).

You guys that live in large cities with lots of competition have it a lot better than us in smaller towns.

I guess the only good thing I have going for me is I can run torrents 24/7 maxing my dl (did this for over a week in December) and running a steady upstream (although painfully slow) without my ISP saying anything. Even at 3Mbps down, if you run that full out (roughly 360kb/sec) for over a week at a time, that is a lot of gigs of data.


EDIT - The Comcast defends P2P throttling discussion thread was a mess from the beginning with everyone complaining about its forum placement, then it went off topic. To preserve the real content (minus the complaints) of the thread I pulled the posts out and moved them. News & Interesting Links now has the Comcast P2P discussion, and this thread contains all the 'off topic' stuff that was in that thread.