Where Can You Find Information On Places w/ Broadband? 19
PhipleTroenix asks: "My job may be eliminated soon, and I am considering downsizing my lifestyle. I'm looking for a small town (often less expensive) with good bandwith (either Cable modem or DSL).
Boardwatch.com asks you to enter just an area code and it will provide you with a list of ISPs (useless). @home asks you to enter your name/address/e-mail/phone, and they will tell you if cable modem is available. Does anyone know of a way to browse a map for broadband, or any other way to find out if my dream home in BFE will have broadband available?" Ask Slashdot gets a lot of submissions asking about this in some form or another. Is there a site or a database somewhere that lists areas that have broadband services available?
Try Toronto Suburbs. (Score:2)
If you don't mind moving to Canada, there is a company [futureway.com](uses flash), which offers direct fibre connections to homes in some new developments near Toronto, with plans to expand into other parts of Canada later this year. These connections allow digital phone service ($19.95/month), 1Mbps internet($38.95/month, with future bandwidth upgrades possible), and digital television through another company [look.ca]. Anyway the deal is that that is the only com-link you need, and you only get one bill for phone, internet, and tv.
Oh, and note that prices are in $Canadian. (to convert to USD multiply by ~.65)
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You have to take a chance... (Score:2)
With cable internet access, if the town is small enough and your house or apt is *in* town, cable should be available everywhere and not just portions. One thing to watch out for is apt complexes that provide NO cable at all. And the cable co likely will not run a line in just for your one apt.
With DSL, it's so critical and sensitive, you actually won't know for sure until your line is physically tested by the telco and you can't do this 'til you move in and order a phone.
My wife and I just bought our first house last summer. Everytime we went "house-hunting", I'd write down or remember a street address of a house that looked interesting. You can usually guess the important parts of the phone number. What matters is the area code and the first (3) digits (exchange number, I believe). Then, simply go to either the local telco's webpage and enter this info or go to a DSL provider such as Covad and enter the same info. Covad though, is not in "small" towns. Even better, the DSL Reports [dslreports.com] site mentioned above... it queries most DSL and telco companies for availability at the address you specify.
Re:DSLReports (Score:3)
Re:http://www.2wire.com/dsllookup/finddsl.asp (Score:1)
Not available where you'd expect... (Score:1)
RJ
telco (Score:1)
Re:BFEDSL or BFECableModem (Score:1)
BFEDSL or BFECableModem (Score:2)
DSLReports (Score:1)
cable modems are fairly prevalent as well (Score:2)
(would say something about DSLreports but somebody beat me to the punch)
Anyway, in my part of the world (Texas, USA), cable modems are becoming suprisingly common. My mother has a cable modem in Nacogdoches, which is ~30,000 people deep in East Texas, a few hours drive from anything. It's roughly performance equal to a dual ISDN line, probably becuase the cable company doesn't have a really fat pipe (being as I said pretty much 150 miles from anything like a big city and thus a comm hub). I've heard from friends in other parts of the country that cable companies in their area are reasonably far along in their rollout as well.
So basically give the cable company/companies in the target town(s) a call to see if they offer service. True, cable modems might not be the absolute best solution technically and they might have crummy EULA/TOS consrtaints, but it beats dialup by a long shot... (Also there are typically fewer cable companies than ISPs for a given town, cutting down on the number of people to call.)
Good luck!
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Fuck Censorship.
http://www.2wire.com/dsllookup/finddsl.asp (Score:2)
2wire.com has a Free DSL Lookup Service [2wire.com]. It takes your address and phone number, then tells you:
Secondly, I wanted to encourage you to opt for DSL instead of Cable if you can. Cable is definately the price winner, but using DSL allows you to (most of the time) chose between a large variety of competing ISP's. Whereas with Cable you have one big monopoly giving the lowest common denominator of service level (which means downtime and slow upgrade processes resulting in some months being 100kbps and other months being 900kbps).
However, if you take your time to find a good DSL ISP, you'll get one that has good server uptime, never cheats on the bandwidth, and yeilds great latencies (e.g. 20ms to yahoo.com). You should also evaluate what DSL Provider you can use. Some areas only have one avaiable (such as Covad). But where I am there are 4 choices (New Edge, Covad, NorthPoint, and Easystreet). Of those 4, when I toured New Edge's NOC, I was very impressed! They have top of the line Alcatel (#1 brand in DSL) switches and can send a packet from west coast to east coast and back in under 4 milliseconds. (THAT is good latency). I hope that helps in your search. -Dan Browning
Saskatchewan (Score:1)
http://www.sasktel.com/highspeed/index.html
Re:Try Toronto Suburbs. (Score:1)
According to Homefair's Salary Calculator [homefair.com], Toronto is a smidgen cheaper than Philadelphia, and a good deal more expensive than Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Sacramento, for instance.
Toronto is, however, quite a bit cheaper than San Jose or San Diego.
Re:Try Toronto Suburbs. (Score:1)
Re:Not available where you'd expect... (Score:1)
Don't rule out other options... (Score:2)
Re:http://www.2wire.com/dsllookup/finddsl.asp (Score:1)
They have top of the line Alcatel (#1 brand in DSL) switches and can send a packet from west coast to east coast and back in under 4 milliseconds. (THAT is good latency).
WOW! Transmitting signals at more than 5X the speed of light is truly impressive! I was not aware that subspace communications had been implemented ;-)
Possible location (Score:2)
For example, Ashland Oregon (14 miles north of California) has layed fiber across the entire town -- the phone, cable, isps, etc all share it.... From what I understand, they can get T1 speeds over Fiber for about $35/month.
places with broadband (Score:1)