Re: ?: Cox vs QWEST

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Author: Darrin Chandler
Date:  
To: Terence Chang, Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: ?: Cox vs QWEST
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
   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |


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