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Until recently I’ve used Cincinnati Bell’s Zoomtown server as my Internet provider.  I’ve rarely had problems with their service, until one day I realized the speed I was getting.  They advertise up to 5 Mb/s download speed and I was getting < 1 Mb/s.  Ouch!  I called in and they tried tweaking the connection and router settings, but it didn’t help.  I was just too far away from their closest switch.

Many other people I know, of course, use cable Internet providers, so I looked into InsightBB.  They advertise up to 10 Mb/s download *.  I signed up for both Internet and VOIP phone service to save a little money and get some more speed.

At first the speed didn’t seem to be that much better.  I was getting around 1.2 Mb/s.  It was faster but just not good.  I have a small network within the house and thought that may be causing the problem, so I connected my laptop directly to the cable modem and got upwards of 12 Mb/s, so obviously the issue was in my network.

After a few emails with Nino (I know very little about networking other than the simple stuff like getting IP addresses, etc.) I tried replacing the gateway router I was using with a different router I already had.  Now here is my speed test:

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That’s > 10 Mb/s download!  During the test I did see some 12 Mb/s peaks.  Sweet!  Now it won’t take 8+ hours to pull stuff from MSDN.

Again, I’ll say that I rarely had issues with Zoomtown service, so I’m not advocating a switch out right.  I can say the service is cheaper and faster, so you can draw you own conclusions.  Also, anytime I’ve called into Insight while getting this all worked out I was on hold a maximum of two minutes!  With Cincinnati Bell I constantly wait up to 15-40 minutes to speak to someone.  To be fair, Cincinnati Bell does have a cool call back feature where you can reserve your place in line and when it comes up they call you back.  Nice feature, but the fact that people are on hold so long that the feature is needed should be telling.

  • Insight just announced a new 20 Mb/s download service for limited testing.