I would like broadband Internet access at home so that I can
connect my microcomputers to the Internet and do things like
VoIP, videoconferencing and downloads that don't take all
night.  The hardest part seems to be determining the actual
cost.

The cable television/Internet company boast US$ 20 per
month, but the small print says that after four months
"regular monthly service rates apply", without mentioning
what those rates are.  I may phone them later today just to
ask.

The telephone company are a little more forthcoming about
their DSL service: it's US$ 13 per month for the first year
and US$ 30 per month afterwards. I think that's a fair price
but the lack of a static IP address is unfortunate.

Sattelite Internet isn't a viable option: it costs too much,
has latency high enough to hamper VoIP and costs too much.

How do you connect to the Internet?  How much does it cost
you?

34 responses total.

Did I mention that Satellite Internet costs too much?  ;-)

I have a cable modem which comes bundled with my CATV service. I have no
idea how much it costs.

Both cable TV (but not Premium channels) and Broadband (but not VOIP), and 
dynamic IP addresses, cost us just under $100/mo. (We use WiFi for the 
Internet connection and since we have moved computers around, and can 
serve visitors with their laptoips.)

I bought a wireless router to plug into the DSL/Cable modem
or whatever I eventually end up with. Hopefully I'll be able
to connect to the Internet via the Wireless LAN.

Should be no problem. I have a wired LAN (with two desktops) connecting to
the wireless base station  by means of a wireless adapter.

Provided I can get a wireless network adaptor to work with
NetBSD, the LAN setup shouldn't be a huge problem. Arranging
a broadband connection to the Internet seems more of a
challenge, mostly because I can't get meaningful numbers
from either of the two available providers.

I have Comcast cable Internet, currently.  It started at $29.95/month 
(plus my cable TV charges), then went up to nearly $50/month after six 
months.  I'm about to switch to Speakeasy OneLink DSL, for $56/month, 
because Comcast's connection has been unreliable for the last few 
months.  One nice thing about Speakeasy is they give you a static IP.  
They have a good reputation for reliability and customer service.  I 
don't have enough experience with them yet to say if it's deserved, but 
I've been impressed by their professionalism -- within a couple hours 
of placing my order, I received an email with a loop install date and 
the IP and network info for my connection.  They also set you up with a 
real router, not a modem that you then have to get your computer to run 
PPP-over-Ethernet to.

A static IP address would certainly be nice, but US$ 56 per month
seems a bit steep.  Perhaps you're getting oodles of bandwidth though.

Like all DSL connections it depends on how close you are to the central 
office.  I'm way the hell out there, apparently, so I get 1.5 Mbps/384 
kbps.  They go as high as 6 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream if 
you're close enough.  For a little under $10 more per month I can stop 
having to reset my cable modem every few hours to keep the connection 
up, and that's worth it to me.

If I threw a stone hard enough from my back door, I could probably
break the window of a telco van parked by the local exchange.  384k
either way would make me very happy.  I spent much of today trying to
install software on a remote machine, but VNC over dial-up is as slow
as treacle on a cold day.  :-(

Yeah, it is.  I hope you're using a version of VNC that supports local 
cursors, at least.  The "TightVNC" variant always seemed to be the best 
over dialup.

At the remote (MS Windows) end I'm using whatever the most recent
version of RealVNC is (4.something) locally I have vncviewer-
3.3.3.2nb3 from pkgsrc.

You're using Windows? ugh. Poor you.

As an aside, how much stability to you sacrifice if you want to run pkgsrc
from current?

The site has MS Windows on all of the desktop PCs. I had hoped to have
weaned them of that by now, but alas they're in the hole and still
digging. Sadly I've not found anyone to take over the software support
work there, which would free up time for higher priority work.

pkgsrc-current is a "coin toss": if you get lucky, your packages will
build and may be less out of date than those from a stable release of
pkgsrc.

Provide Net's DSL service is like 30/month with a static IP and they let you
do stuff like run your own web server. I would recomend them.

Wow!  Those are awesome terms.  Most places, last I checked,
specifically prohibited any sort of server.  Usually helped along by
dynamic IPs with leases as short as 8 hours.  Bleck!

I always did like Provide.Net.  I would switch to them in a second, but
I don't think they can deliver acceptable DSL performance 10296000 feet
from the DSLAM.  ;)

Once my contract's up, I'll look at provide.net.

Just an update: Speakeasy has been awesome.  I've only once had a 
connection problem that wasn't my fault, and they were very good about 
getting it fixed quickly.  Even better, they kept me "in the loop" -- 
you get direct access to the trouble ticket information for your 
problem, including all the comments by the local loop provider's field 
techs.

    About one year ago I finally gave up on Comcast for
Internet service.  There were days when I'd get 50 kbits/sec
downstream, which might be impressive for a dial-up modem
but not for Cable.  I switched to AT&T 'U-verse' VDSL, which
seems to work much better where I live.

    One disappointment though has been the 'gateway' (modem,
router, switch and wireless access point combined).  It cost
$100 and turned out to be bulky, klunky (802.11g @ 2.4 GHz,
100baseTX on the wired ports) and, judging by the scuffed
mouldings, used.  Had I not been desperate for working
Internet service I would have sent it back to them.  To add
5 GHz WiFi I'll have to plug in a new wireless access point.

It always made me wonder if the modem I took back to their office
(Charter) because it didn't work, got a quick wipe down and put back on
the shelf for other customers.  You just never know what you are going
to get sometimes.

    I should probably have been more insistent that they
replace it.  My ADSL modem was a fraction of the size of the
VDSL one and would have fit much better on the telephone
shelf in the kitchen where the router lives.

That always bugs me when you get used to one device and the new one
takes up more space.  I have a wifi router like that.  You can, in
theory lay it down, but it gets too hot that way so I have to stand
it up (and right now I have a desk fan blowing on it keeping it nice
and cool).  I guess it's time to put an A/C unit in this window
here. Too many computers and too many switches, routers, modems,
etc. generates some heat.

Handy in the winter, I suppose. ;-)

Yeah, no problem with heat in that room in the winter.

    If only we could build computers that would cool a room
down in the summer! :-)

Wouldn't that be something!  Probably cost an arm and a
leg, though.

    I found it interesting to re-read this item.  Comcast
stopped working and I didn't want to deal with AT&T's shady
cup game so I went with VDSL service from Earthlink.  It's
$45 for 3M down, 1.5M up and comes in over AT&T copper,
through an AT&T modem but I can let Earthlink deal with them
if and when that breaks.

Interesting. I thought I was paying more for everything here in Japan, but
we pay only about $30 (3200 JPY) per month for a 1 Gbps fiber optic network
connection.

Where I live, I doubt that's available at any price.

I'm expecting delivery of Starlink hardware any day now.

Let us know how well it works.

Re. 30: I've been tempted just because the Internet service
    here is limited to AT&T even if I buy it through another
    company. Starlink isn't ready yet though and I feel as a
    former astronomy student I probably shouldn't encourage
    them.

resp:32 Heh. Watch the skies!

Starlink works great if you're willing to use that much electricity.
My use is offgrid and Starlink uses much more energy than advertised -
especially when it is homing and triangulating.  In high wind areas,
that can be quite frequent.  Alas, it was not sustainable on my
8 solar panel with 2 deep cycle marine batteries which also supply a
few other digital items like cameras and sensors.

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