Qwest DSL vs Charter broadband
For those of you who hate Charter Communications as much as I do, you might not want to keep reading.
Disclaimer aside, I fell off the broadband wagon, again. It’s been a couple of years since I cheerfully called Charter to inform them I would not stand paying them money every month for their underachieving bandwidth and horrible customer service. Since then I’ve used Clearwire and presently Qwest for all my surfing, torrenting, and every blue moon–a blog post.
I ended up terminating my Clearwire contract because the signal was really bad at our house in Sauk Rapids. I felt bad about leaving them at first, but after 3 months of arguing about a sneaky clause buried in the Term & Conditions (which I digitally signed; which means there was probably a 5 row tall textarea with monster scrollbar action needed to read everything; which means I probably didn’t want to read through it with a creepy install tech at my place watching me over my shoulder). Where was I going with this? Oh, buried in the T/Cs it states you have to give 90 days notice before your 1 year contract expires to terminate the contract. I specifically asked their sales guy termination of contract when he was pitching it to me. He lied and I didn’t bust him on it.
On to Qwest. I figured I’d give Qwest a try for a few simple reasons. 1) Qwest was the only major telecom to NOT sell out customers to government spying. 2) DSL has always been a favorite acronym of mine…no idea why. 3) They were basically my last option.
To give you a perspective of how bad I hated Charter bad then, here is the deal I signed up for with Qwest: 30$/month for 1.5 Mbs Say WHAT? Yes, it was about half the bandwidth Charter offered in lowest package but the same price.
Last month I found out my Qwest price was a 9 month promotional price. So the rate is now 50$/month for 1.5Mbs. Bullocks!
So I put my tail between my legs while I called Charter to try out their service again. Tonight I have Qwest and Charter both hooked up to the internets and the bandwidth tests have been nice to see.
Here is Qwest:
Here is Charter:
I ran this test 3 times on each connection with fairly consistent results. Charter’s 5MB broadband is about 4.75 mb/s down, 500 kb/s up. Qwest’s 1.5MB is barely 1 mb/s down but 500-600 kb/s up. But the kicker is Charter is cheaper (even after promotion ends).
Why does Qwest not even attempt to be competitive with Charter? Qwest has slower internet, phone, and offers satellite packages from DIRECTV. Charter has way faster internet, phone and mega cable. It’s no wonder why everyone has bundle packages with them. There is no suitable alternative in our area.