On Thursday, I wrote about beginning to change from years and years of solid service from Time Warner Cable's Road Runner broadband internet service to Windstream DSL. You can click here to read that blog.
My initial Windstream order was not done correctly, and I was only getting download speeds of 3 megabits per second yesterday, which was much slower than the 13 I was getting from Time Warner.
At 13 megabits, you can download a good sized movie in about eight minutes or an iTunes song in four seconds. At 3 megabits, the speeds I was getting, it's 14 seconds for the song download and 35 minutes for the movie.
But more than that, the internet was just slow. And after Road Running for a long, long time, it felt like I was back on the old AOL dial up connection waiting for that infernal blue bar to move all the way to the right.
That wasn't going to work.
Long story short, I was making the change due to Windstream's new bundle offer -- $49.99 for internet and phone with unlimited long distance for life. The $49.99 offer is good for 3 megabit speed, so I upgraded to 12 megabits, as fast as Windstream offers. That pumped up my bill to $59.99 (or $66.49 after taxes).
Well, it took three calls to customer service and about an hour of total time to get things fixed, but a Windstream tech made a switch to my service this morning, which involved changing a PIN number. That opened up the broadband pipe to my home. I am now getting speeds of 12.63 megabits per second, not far off the 13.31 I was getting from Road Runner yesterday. My upload speeds are twice as fast (0.64 to 0.35) as I got from Time Warner.
Best of all, I'm getting a home phone again plus speedy internet for about the same price as I was paying Time Warner Cable for Road Runner alone.
Late last year, I dropped my home phone service and just went cellular. It trimmed my bills, but giving the kids your cellphone to use whenever they needed to make a call -- or giving it to guests -- got a little bit old.
So next week, I will cancel my Road Runner service, turn in my modem and move on.
Am I making the right call?
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