In the rural areas in New Mexico, there are a few choices for an internet provider. One of them is Higher-Speed Internet and we wanted to support the local guys. Their plans included 256k, 758k, and 1m speeds, and we choose the fastest at 1m. They explained that the service is best effort service (meaning everyone shares the bandwidth) but we should expect around 650kbits and rarely slower. That's great speed for us so we were thrilled, then it got hooked up...
We can barely surf the internet most days it's so slow. Speed tests done throughout the day for the past two months regularly show 20-60kbits, and we rarely download faster than 6kb/s. 56k connections download as fast as this does most of the time. Rare spurts of speed are short lived (1-2 min) and it goes back to either full off or around 1/10th the speed we pay for.By rare spurts of speed, I mean the 650k-1m we pay for.
We asked for help, and they would call us back about 75% of the time. The connections were good they said, and explained to us again that this is a "best effort service, " so basically these speeds are due to bringing on more people than their service can handle.
Steer clear of this company, your money is better spent elsewhere.
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