[ale] isp questions

[Derek Atkins]

Kamin Horvath via Ale <ale at ale.org> writes:

> Hey all (first time replying here),
>
> I’m going through a similar decision at our new place. We have a choice of
> xfinity or AT&T fiber and reading all this - I’m leaning more towards the
> former. 

I was a comcast business class customer for a long time.  I am now an
AT&T giga-fiber customer.  Here's my take:

Comcast's network engineering is FAR superior to AT&T's.  They have
better tech support and better peering.  However, you pay for that.  I
was paying around $160/mo for IIRC 75/10 with a /29.

With AT&T I've got ostensibly 1G/1G with a /29 and I'm paying a total of
$85/mo.  HOWEVER, while I do see 950mb with speedtest, I feel the
peering is worse and I only see 200-250mbps for any practical
usage.  For example, if I use BitTorrent to pull down the new Fedora
DVD, which SHOULD be able to saturate my network, it doesn't -- it gets
limited to 200-250mbps.  I assume this isn't on my end because I can see
those 950mbps speedtest results from the same endpoint on my end.

Mind you, this isn't a completely fair comparison.  It is certainly
possible that Comcast would also limit to 200-250mbps for peered links.
I had no way to test that.  However, the fact that I'm paying half as
much for almost 20x the bandwidth and the same number of static IPs made
the decision pretty easy.

Just my $0.02.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant