That's interesting. Competition would be a very good thing... although I haven't heard any of the ISPs here boasting (or promising) anything that even approaches the 1 Gbit/s up/down speeds that Google says we'll be getting here.
Right now we have two different ISPs at our company, the primary one is cable (through Knology or WOW or whatever they are calling themselves this week)... it has static IPs and is the pipe that goes straight to the servers (and then to all the other computers). We also have AT&T as a secondary ISP which we can use on occasion if the pipes are getting choked, or in the event that the cable has an interruption (which
does happen on occasion). I will say the AT&T pipe is slow as molasses compared to cable.
I do remember fielding a cold-call phone call at home from an AT&T salesman hawking their service (I have the same cable ISP at home). The AT&T guy kept harping on the fact that their speeds are
constant, whereas the cable speeds fluctuate a fair bit, depending on area usage. My response to him was that, yes, it fluctuates, but even at it's
slowest speed it's still multiple times faster than AT&T. "Yes," he said, "But our speed is
constant." I tried to explain to him that being able to drive anywhere from 50 to 75mph was better than a
guaranteed 10mph... but he didn't seem to get it. Seems like a tough sell to me, I wouldn't want his job.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com