Home and businesses having high-speed Internet connections are now fairly common these days. I absolutely recommend one of these services, and in fact my company will no longer service any PC that is not connected to the Internet by a high-speed connection. The issue is that you just can't download the fixes and updates you need to keep a PC healthy these days on a slow speed dial-up connection.
Although both services available here to us in the Southport area have been fairly stable, there have been some changes recently. Available to us are two services, DSL from BellSouth, and Road Runner from Time Warner Cable. Before we begin, I do not have any connection, financial or otherwise, with either company.
I tend to favor Road Runner, although there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides. I think DSL tends to be more stable in the long run. But you have to sign up for a year of service at a minimum, and they don't actually come out to your home or business to install it. What BellSouth does is to ship you a box of parts (modem, software, cables, filters) that you have to install yourself (or get someone like me to do it). You also have to put a filter on each regular phone. One advantage of DSL is that they do offer the lowest cost plan - their DSL Lite package has reduced bandwidth (i.e. performance), but if you are looking to move up from a dial-up with minimum increased cost, DSL Lite may be the easiest path. BellSouth also offers DSL Ultra and DSL Extreme. I couldn't get too much information about them as their website uses some kind of popup or Java applet that wouldn't get through my security software.
Road Runner, on the other hand, requires no long-term contract, and they send someone to your home or office to actually hook it up and make sure it is running. The cost of Road Runner is more than the DSL Lite package, but it varies depending on which cable TV package you have.
Road Runner has recently significantly increased its bandwidth. There is a test you can run at www.triad.rr.com/speed_test/index.html, which calculates your actual performance. I have been reading consistently in the 4.5-4.8 Mbps (megabits per second) recently. That is almost triple what I used to get.
Both companies offer some free software, such as anti-virus software. Most of these free packages are mediocre, but available if you want them. Road Runner now offers a free Internet Video Mail package that actually works fairly well. You have to have a PC attached camera (sometimes incorrectly called a webcam) and a good microphone, but you can record up to 45 seconds of video that you can include in an email. My wife tried it the other day and liked it. The advantage of this service is that it uses a server to store the video, thus you are not actually sending huge messages to your friends or relatives. The video is stored for 30 days.
Road Runner also offers a nice, customizable home page (or portal) at www.rr.com. Both services have webmail, so you can easily access your email when on the road. To sum it up - each service offers some advantages, but you should definitely get one, and soon!
To be complete, I believe that there is or was another high-speed Internet service in Southport, called Southport Wireless. But I haven't heard much about them lately, and their webpage (www.southportwireless.net) shows some "news" that is three years old. But Southport Wireless is a radio signal based service, and you have to be within a certain radius to get a connection.
One beef I have with Road Runner is that they make you disconnect your router (if you have one, and you should) during a service call. They do this because the firewall in the router will block some of their diagnostic tools. This is OK, but when the service call is ended, they don't tell you how to hook it back up! Sometimes, all that is necessary is that the cable modem be reset, but if after doing this and your system starts working, they often cite the router as being the point of failure. In fact, routers rarely fail and if reconnected, everything is fine. So, don't overreact on blaming your router.
Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.