?: Cox vs QWEST

[Darrin Chandler]

Terence Chang wrote:

> 3. Qwest Internet seem to be slower (~2.5MB u/d stream) but stable.

I have about the same speed with Qwest as with Cox, and Qwest is *much* 
more stable. I may not have had the fastest Cox connection, since the 
reason I dumped them was a poor and continually degrading signal strength.

> 1. They claim the speed is 3MB u/d both, but test as 2.5MB using their 
> speed tester, which is against Qwest's own network (not fair). The 
> sprint speed test is 0.8MB, while CNET speed test is 1.3MB.

There really isn't an easy to perform fair test. You'd really need to do 
side-by-side comparisons. Congestion between major backbones, individual 
site overload, etc., etc., can make bottlenecks preventing you from 
getting the full bandwidth.

> 2. The DNS server seem to be up and down or not be able to ping at all 
> (up to once a week)

In my experience, the Qwest DNS servers are the worst I've seen 
anywhere. In a given evening they WILL be down at least once for 5-15 
minutes. For a while I overrode their DHCP DNS servers with some that 
allow public recursion. Now I'm running a caching name server on my end. 
I'd consider this a must.

> 4. Shorter internet connection recover time.

I've rarely noticed outages with Qwest, but when I have they've cleared 
up quickly. When it happened with Cox (more often, but still rare) they 
tended to last for hours.

All that said, I know people on both sides of the fence. I think some 
areas are bad for Cox (heavy neighborhood usage) and some are bad for 
Qwest (nasty, old copper?)... One thing I'm sure of from my experiences 
is that Cox customer service is rancid. Qwest is just Qwest (no gold 
stars), but their customer service is *much* better than Cox.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |