[TriLUG] [OT] Help - comparing bandwidth apples to pineapples

[Chris Merrill]

We're currently on TWC business class broadband on the 30/5 plan.  We are moving
offices soon and are comparing that to TWC's fiber offering.  Even the lowly 3MB
service with fiber is pretty pricey (3x the cost of 30/5 broadband).  I know fiber
is "better", but I don't know what that means in the context of what we need.

I've asked for the copy of the SLA...I'm assuming that is going to provide guarantees
for uptime, latency, capacity, etc.

But from a practical standpoint, what should we expect from the switch?
- will downloads take 10x longer?
- will uploads take ~2x longer?
- will our VOIP issues go away (see below)?

For background, we are a small software / service company (<10 people) and are
absolutely dependent on Internet access for much of our work.  We are moving
more and more of our in-house systems off-site (EC2, AppEngine, other SAAS, etc)

Our TWC broadband service has overall been reasonably good. Though we currently
have several complaints:

1) VOIP issues (dropped packets, latency?)
We are using VOIP (FeatureTel).  Some days we experience a lot of drop-outs
during our calls.  This is very obviously a BAD thing in the middle of a sales
call with our customers.  We've taken various remedies, some have helped for
a while, but the problems come and go, making it hard to troubleshoot.

2) upload capacity
We push big files to the cloud as part of our product build (hundreds of meg at
a time). This can happen daily near the end of our release cycle, but usually
less often.  This problem is much less painful now than it was before DOCSIS 3.

3) random brief outages
Kills our productivity for 5-10 minutes when it happens. We restart the modem,
sometimes that helps but usually not. Problem resolves itself before we can
get a TWC tech on the phone.  Annoying, but not critical...except when it happens
during a presentation for a customer or impedes our testing services?


Thanks for any advice or experiences you can offer!

Chris


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Chris Merrill                           |  Web Performance, Inc.
chris at webperformance.com                |  http://webperformance.com
919-433-1762                            |  919-845-7601

Web Performance: Website Load Testing Software & Services
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