Cable Providers Top Telecom Rivals for Internet Reliability 25
A new study of broadband reliability finds a top-two finish that you might not expect from recent surveys of ISP customer satisfaction: Charter's Spectrum and Comcast's Xfinity, the two largest cable operators in the US. From a report: Opensignal's report, published Thursday, draws on software telemetry collected from April 1 through June 29 of downtime, consistency of service, and how well a provider meets basic thresholds for speed, latency, and other core performance metrics. Spectrum comes in first with a "Reliability Experience" score of 741 out of 1,000, followed by Xfinity with 710, Verizon with 625, AT&T with 546, and T-Mobile with 525. Opensignal chose those five companies to study because each passes more than a third of US homes.
But while Comcast and Charter employ the same basic cable architecture except for a few fiber-to-the-home pockets, Verizon and AT&T have mixed networks. That includes extensive and growing fiber service but also fixed 4G and 5G wireless from Verizon and hybrid-fiber broadband from AT&T, both of which lack fiber's speed and capacity advantages, plus obsolete DSL connectivity. T-Mobile's home connectivity, meanwhile, is almost exclusively fixed wireless.
But while Comcast and Charter employ the same basic cable architecture except for a few fiber-to-the-home pockets, Verizon and AT&T have mixed networks. That includes extensive and growing fiber service but also fixed 4G and 5G wireless from Verizon and hybrid-fiber broadband from AT&T, both of which lack fiber's speed and capacity advantages, plus obsolete DSL connectivity. T-Mobile's home connectivity, meanwhile, is almost exclusively fixed wireless.
Mixing different systems (Score:3)
It would be more helpful if they looked at reliability by system. It doesn't make sense to compare cable to AT&T DSL if the actual choice in your area is cable vs. fiber. For what it's worth, my AT&T fiber connection has never gone down in 4 years (despite some extended power outages and hurricanes). My old Comcast cable internet went down a few times a year.
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Hell Comcrap would go down *daily* for us. Not long enough to make a call but enough that streaming stopped and browsing halted.
Just ridiculous to claim Comcast is any sort of 'reliable'
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Hell Comcrap would go down *daily* for us. Not long enough to make a call but enough that streaming stopped and browsing halted.
Just ridiculous to claim Comcast is any sort of 'reliable'
Daily would be nice. Not a single video chat goes by where I don't have to ask someone to repeat something because of a 10- to 15-second period of total data loss. Meanwhile pings to 8.8.8.8 go through just fine, so they're doing some sort of very, *very* broken QoS mismanagement or per-stream throttling. On business-class cable service.
The day that either the regional wireless service or Starlink adds static IP support, Comcast is gone.
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So in complete fairness (Score:1)
There are two things that have reliability. The first is landing airplanes because if you cock that up the other airlines lose money and so then you're costing rich people money. The second is stock trading because again you're costing rich people money when you mess that up.
For anything that matters to you and me good enough is always good enough
reliability (Score:3)
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my FIOS has been pretty solid since coming back from Comcraptic. Was solid before too. Just playin the switcheroo dance between 'em.
No surprise (Score:3)
People get angry when their TV stops working. When I got my Internet via cable, they sent a technician next day when something was not working.
Now I have some more professional level Internet via Fiber. The provider is mainly targeting businesses, but does offer to private customers at something like 40% higher cost than the competition. Well worth the price, because you get the same support as the business customers. But go down to regular prices and you can wait a week until something happens.
I experienced two outages with Comcast one year. (Score:2)
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I have Comcast at home. It is very reliable. Gigabit service at a decent price. (The price dropped by 50% and the bandwidth went from 100mb to 1gb as soon as Starlink became available...)
I have Comcast at my business. It sucks. We lose connection multiple times a day (it dropped while I was typing this) and pay several times the price I pay at home for 1/10th the bandwidth. When the contract is up, I will be switching providers (thinking of going with Starlink ... ).
Strange how Comcast can have such va
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I switched to T-Mobile's wireless solution.
Don't know how much you're paying for what level of service, but Ting [tingmobile.com] uses T-Mobile (as well as others) and all their plans include hot spot -- and I think you can use a dedicated device for that too. I have Cox for my home phone, Internet and TV -- and it's been very reliable, but have Ting (over T-Mobile) for my phone using their Flex Plan -- $10/month for unlimited talk/text + $5/GB 5G data -- and my bill is $17.33/month. Other plans include bundles of 5G data. I rarely use any cell data, usually us
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I hat T-Mobile for over 2 years. When it was on the 4G network it was stable, reliable and had few issues. When they removed half the 4G radios on the tower and replaced them with 5G my, T-Mobile become total trash. VPN WILL NOT WORK on their 5G. They use Dual industrial-grade NAT and have it configured to change IP's every 3-5 seconds on the outbound side. I tested this from my ISP and from my end. VPN's won't handle such a fast switching without seriously compromising them. All T-Mobile has to do i
I've was in a WFH arrangement for several years (Score:2)
Let me guess: (Score:1)
LOL. When Comcast screwed the pooch last year, I finally had enough of them and switched to fiber from another company. Ridiculously faster than Comcasts shitty cable, symmetrical speed, and haven't had a single problem with it. Had to get email service elsewhere but that works out better for me in the long run anyway.
BTW I don't use Comcast for anything at all now. I have an antenna on the roof for TV. Cable companies can go fuck themselves.
Gaming (Score:2)
It all sounds like a game of Monopoly to me.
AT&T Maintains a Closed Network (Score:2)
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Cell Phones (Score:2)
Starlink has been rock solid for me so far... (Score:2)
Comcast must have pulled a VW (Score:1)
Comcast had to have found a way to game the test like VW did with diesel emissions testing. I had Adelphia for a few years before Comcast bought them. Then was stuck with Comcast for over 10 years. There was never a day that Comcast didn't have a hiccup and very rarely a month that I didn't have at least a half hour of down time. On top of that I never got the advertised speed.If it was 50% of advertised, it was a good day. I also worked for an Alberta Canada based company. Comcast hated the city they were
YMMV (Score:2)
Due to working from home, I have dual ISP's to mitigate downtime in the event one of them
drops or has upstream connection issues.
Frontier Fiber and Xfinity Cable.
Hands down, Xfinity is the more stable / reliable of the two.
As much as folks like to hate on Xfinity, my connection rarely has issues whereas Frontier
seems to blow up at least once a month. Don't even get me started on the Act of God that
is required to get Frontier to fix something. After being out for almost two months, I had to
submit an FCC co
Quit Comcast... went to Tmobile. It's been good. (Score:1)
Comcast *KEPT* raising my rates and I still had hours of unscheduled downtime (some times an entire night from 2am to 6am). They were going towards $85 a month just for internet.
So I switched to T-mobile. I've had much less unscheduled downtime. And it's $55 a month with autobill... $50 for autodraft from my bank (which I don't feel comfortable with).
No wires. I've had 4 computers going when the grandsons are over and everything ran fine for Risk of Rain, Youtube, Minecraft, Gloomhaven, some Rogue L