MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Broadband Internet dilemma

> U-Verse is the fastest, but still has a cap, and the funky hardware scares me.

There are two gateways floating around, and both are pretty awesome. Both come equipped with a 450mW wireless router, which is "higher-end" power when you are considering home use wireless routers. Most of the off the shelf brands aren't even 100mW.

They both have 4 ports coming out of the back. The black router is a bit newer and handles traffic a bit better than the silver one. Sorry I don't have model numbers.

The link coming in should be VDSL or DSL2, both of which are surprisingly usable and comparable to cable.

> The other thought is that DSL (and U-Verse) are not shared the way that cable
> broadband is, so in theory, the speeds should be more consistent.

In theory, but unless you live in an apartment building or a really congested condo/townhouse plot that theory is a little outdated.

> What the hell should I do? I have no idea if I'd ever hit a 150GB or 250GB cap. I
> guess with Netflix, it would be possible.

Comcast has the same cap, all-be-it unspoken. Not sure on Time Warner. Even when I've heavily abused my internet I haven't come that close to the cap, and I used to transfer a TON of data. Not Andrew levels, but enough to say even with Netflix you'll be OK. (~8.3GB a day doesn't seem like a lot, but you really have to work at things to pull that every day.)

The only advice I can give if you go uverse is to immediately download a program called "UVRealtime" It's a great analysis too, and will tell you right away if there are things like bridge taps affecting your line. If there is trouble on your line your service will drop out, and you may have to help the technician out a bit if he's new. I had a few line issues the first week, but once they were resolved I haven't noticed a difference from my ~20/6 Comcast service I had before this. In fact I'd say some bigger downloads are faster consistently through the download. Leads me to believe that the Comcast "SpeedBoost" was more of a "Speed throttle" after 20 seconds....

Also, this is a decent way to bypass tier 1 customer support :
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/uverse