> "Lou" == Lou <knight4li...@gmail.com> writes: Lou> Hi guys. I would like to know your opinion and experiences with ISP Lou> near Gresham. I recently moved to zip code 97230. What is the best Lou> ISP that will let me use my own modem and router? I like to tink Lou> and install custom firmwares like DD-WRT and LibreCMC.
>From the 97230 zip code and "Gresham", we can infer that Lou is in NW Gresham (between 162nd and 201st, between Burnside and the Columbia). I'm guessing he is in the CenturyLink "zero infrastructure investment zone". His broadband options may be Comcast Residential ($$) and Comcast Business ($$$$). Regards DSL, see below. On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 03:48:29PM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > The ILEC in Gresham is Frontier, I think (I don't live in Gresham, so > that's a guess). I don't know what Frontier does on fiber. Comcast is > almost certainly also available there. My sister, in a condo in southwest Gresham, is on Frontier DSL. Not sure if she could get FIOS even if she could afford it. However, there are some new, small third party providers specializing in new deployments to apartment and condo complexes. Much of the new construction in the Pearl district is provisioned this way. Also, some new $$$$ apartment buildings out here in the 'burbs. Here in Beaverton, we once had Verizon FIOS. Verizon was *excellent*. We chose the slowest speed (15/5) at a decent price, and it was a REAL 15/5, no Ookla Speed Test "up to" nonsense. I looked at scraps of the fiber optic material they installed; single mode armored, 50 year construction, and capable of terabit bandwidth if the optical terminals are. In the near term, they split the feed to the street through a wavelength division multiplexer, so we could have expected future upgrades to "only" 10 Gbps unless they took out the WDM and fed us directly from a terabit switch. Oh, the bandwidth marvels I anticipated ... The ONT is a hulking beast on the garage wall, but it provides POTS and CAT5 directly. A routable IP address that hasn't changed in years. And then Verizon sold the copper and fiber to Frontier. Frontier fired the nice people in the Seattle regional service center. Now they connect us to Texas minwage script monkeys after 45 minutes on hold. They changed the contract, and won't tell us what it is. While we still have 15/5 to the switch, and perhaps to the netflix server co-located with the switch (we don't watch TV), and of course to Ookla, the backhaul to anywhere else (including Google) measures about 100 to 200 kbps, and routes through Pleasanton CA now, rather than Seattle. When bandwidth plunged a few weeks ago, the spam calls increased from 5 per week to 15 per day. Frontier may be getting a kickback from the phone spammers. Frontier stock price has dropped by a factor of 270 since their peak. When I looked two weeks ago, market cap was $1B and debt was around $20B, interest was about $1.5B per year. They are failing, almost dead, and worth more as scrap. Their biggest investor is Vanguard Funds. I presume Vanguard is incompetent also; move your retirement savings elsewhere. So, I could wait and hope someone with brains buys them and fixes them (if every adult in the US sends $10 to Personal Telco, Russell Senior can do it). Best case, a savvy financial group buys just Oregon and Washington, or merely Gresham and Washington County, for some fraction of that $1B market cap, and we expand a community fiber system from that still-capable core. And hire back those helpful people in Seattle. Or, I sit on my butt and watch them fail, go dark, and I use the wifi at PSU. Then wait in a very long queue for a Comcast installation. I DO NOT RECOMMEND FRONTIER. However, I don't expect manna (or megabits) to rain from the sky. My wife uses Comcast Business in her northwest Portland office building. Spendy, competent and prompt field service, routable IP (connected to our own firewall). They turned off the damned XFINITY wifi and allowed us to put a Personal Telco node on the firewall DMZ (Frontier treats business customers well, and charge $$$$ for it). Sadly, soon after the Comcast installation, the office building was bought by twits. The new owners are tearing the insides apart (and cut through the comcast cable once) "remodelling" it, so we can't do the PTP node (or even much business) there. We expect her to be kicked out when her lease runs out in November. So, we will move the Comcast Business service home, and figure out where we go from there. Probably move the business and house phone numbers to Ooma, and use their enhanced VOIP service to a POTS converter box in the house. Both Ooma and Comcast offer "simultaneous ring", which allows us to use one of the phone spam filtering services (if you want a laugh and have the bandwidth, look at the "Jolly Roger Telephone Company" TEDx talk). It also will help my wife transition her business to temporary or part time office space. There's more to the provider decision than cost and speed and hardware compatibility (those are very important, of course). In the best case, look for financial strength, excellent customer and technical service, POTS telephone services (the copper still works when the lights go out), transparent billing and limited price hikes (for which Comcast Residential sucks). Supporting local business (or a nonprofit or coop or ...) would be much better, but the new providers I know about have limited and focused capabilities, and probably won't connect to you. If the houses in your area are more than 60 years old, the copper phone wires are oxidizing and the insulation is waterlogged; DSL and voice WILL SUCK in rainy season (between October and June). Whatever choice you make, private/public/whatever, realize that no organization is perfect, and incompetence can destroy anything. Don't assume that what you get now will be better (or even as good) in the future. Design for flexibility and plan fallback options. That's about 120% of what I know, and 400% of what you want to read. I'll report after our Comcast Business move, and our subsequent transition off of Frontier. Assuming I'm still connected, and the rest of you still are. Cross fingers. The "singularity" is a divide by zero, and zero is looking more likely. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
