Road Runner free upgrade to Premium service

[jeffx]

Verizon FIOS is just starting to become available in my local area, but won't be available in my neighborhood until January/December. They offer 5 mbps down / 2 mbps up for only $35/month and 15mb/2mb for $45/month.

Today I called Road Runner Sales and asked them what plans they had to compete with the FIOS plans (I'm currently on the Time Warner All-in-one plus Stars package for $100/month). They were able to give me a free upgrade from 5mb/384kb to Road Runner Premium which is 8mb/512kb.

I guess that will have to keep me happy until FIOS is on my street...

 

[Mike]

Wow, and I thought FIOS may be the cable killer. Guess they already have their defense plan on that one.

Well, another case where competition improves conditions for consumers.

 

[jeffx]

With the greater bandwidht Fiber offers over coax, Verizon FIOS TV should be able to offer many more HD channels. Also, their standard 2 Mb upload compared to cable internet's max of 512 kb (on residential plans) gives 4x the upload. Better streaming for my surveillance cameras.

 

[deranged]

You guy's are making me jealous, I have road runner but there is no competition from the phone company here. The best they offer is 1 meg down and a whopping 128k up. ugh.. I had it for a while and up speed was more like 64k.

And this miserable little phone company will never offer any decent service. Luckily Road Runner runs okay, not great but okay.

StevenE

 

[electron]

Did they actually upgrade your account, or just increase your limits? I called them, and they said that the premium account is $30 more. They did say that they are upgrading the regular accounts to premium account speeds in a few months, for free, and that the premium limits will be increased to 12mbps.

 

[jeffx]

The person I was speaking with stated that my account was actually upgraded to Premium for free. That would be nice if I had 12Mb down until FIOS was installed.

That's good news about all the accounts being upgraded, unfortunately, I doubt anyone will actually see those download speeds over cable lines. Even with my cap now at "8 Mb", I barely tested out over 2 Mb the other night, most likely due to network congestion in my area from TV, ip phone, internet, HDTV etc.

I was able to upload at 500+ kb, though, which is an improvement.

 

[jeffx]

Fiber-optic cable has a wider signal frequency bandwidth than it's metallic coaxial counterpart. This means more available channels of communication.

For example, metallic coaxial cable has an effective bandwith of 10 MHz. By comparison, fiber-optic cable has an effective bandwidth of 44.6 MHz.km. This means an effective potential of more than 670 simultaneous telephone conversations over one glass fiber.