Economical alternatives to Qwest/Centurylink in the Denver area?

[Melissa2012B]

We're in the Denver area and have been using Qwest/Centurylink for our DSL strictly because we haven't found an economical ( cost competitive ) alternative YET! We've nicknamed them "Banana Republic Phone Company".

We have our land line and DSL with them, and it seems like anytime it's been cold and damp outside ( like the past few days ) our home phone and often DSL go out. For YEARS now!

One tech told me it's because they continue to use 60 year old paper and foil phone lines and won't change them. Then they have to send someone out to "burn" them off so they work again. In our opinion they suck...well, you know.

But we need an alternative. We have a cell phone account and could use that for the home phone too, it's replacing the DSL at a viable cost that we don't know how to do yet. We have 2 PC's here in the house and surf the net quite a bit, plus use them for our little home based business, but I have no idea how much monthly bandwidth we use. We don't download tunes or adult stuff, but do watch some YouTube etc on the web. We'd just rather not have to worry about bandwidth. Oh yeah, we want to watch streaming TV too, I forgot that, like Netflix, if we can get the Roku boxes to work right. So far the signal has been so bad from the Qwest PK5000 DSL wireless router, that we cant use the Roku at one end of the house.

So how does this work? Do we get a wireless account with some kind of broadband wireless company? Can we route it through our Qwest PK5000 somehow? Do we buy wireless dongles for each PC?

I don't know much about all this, or what our options are.

Oh, we also send the occasional fax, but have RingCentral now, though we'd like to dump them too if we could do this and just use the cell phone instead of a land line too. But if we do this, we need a low cost reliable way of sending and receiving faxes. Come to think of it, we cant dump RingCentral or we'd lose our 800 number that lots of our clients have out there...

Or will this even be cost-competitive with the Qwest/Centurylink DSL?

We'd LOVE to dump them!!!

[YeOldeStonecat]

What I've done for myself when I had phone based internet service...including going back to the dial up days...and I have my clients do that same thing.....when getting DSL...have the phone company run in brand new lines from the street...to the house/apartment/building...all new lines right up to where the DSL modem will be located. It really won't cost much..and the greatly increased reliability is well worth it. Did that even back in the dial up days. During bad weather I'd have no problems and I listen to others moan and groan about connection problems in bad weather.

Other alternative..have cable in your area? Usually quite a bit faster than DSL..sometimes a little bit more expensive. Based on your needs I don't think you'll find cellular internet very good for you.

Regarding fax needs..plenty of internet based Fax setups like eFax...works with your e-mail client...my wife uses that for her home business.

[Melissa2012B]

What I've done for myself when I had phone based internet service...including going back to the dial up days...and I have my clients do that same thing.....when getting DSL...have the phone company run in brand new lines from the street...to the house/apartment/building...all new lines right up to where the DSL modem will be located. It really won't cost much..and the greatly increased reliability is well worth it. Did that even back in the dial up days. During bad weather I'd have no problems and I listen to others moan and groan about connection problems in bad weather.

They told us it would cost a LOT here. ( forget what they said, but it was in the hundreds ) PLUS they have cable issues outside our drop. I think the main line bundle coming out of our area is also an old "lead line". Why don't they just switch to fiber? Money.

Other alternative..have cable in your area? Usually quite a bit faster than DSL..sometimes a little bit more expensive.

I think so, but we tried them for TV service years ago and they stank too. So we went to DirecTV, which we're pretty happy with, except for the $130 a month.

Based on your needs I don't think you'll find cellular internet very good for you.

From what I've heard, the bandwidth costs could kill us.

Regarding fax needs..plenty of internet based Fax setups like eFax...works with your e-mail client...my wife uses that for her home business.

Used it before RingCentral and thought it was pretty bad. Weren't getting or sending faxes reliably, which is death for a small business like ours.
They wouldn't fix it, so we walked.

RingCentral is costing about $55/mo but we get simultaneous ring for the business so we don't miss calls when we go out with the cell phone, and the fax is pretty reliable. The only problem is when the land line goes down. We SHOULD be able to just pickup the cell and take the calls, because of the simultaneous ring, BUT instead it rings on the cell once, then goes right to voicemail and we lose clients. I contacted them about it and the workaround is to go to their setup page and uncheck the home number until the land line works again, but we shouldnt have to do that.

The ONLY real advantage with a land line phone is that, during a national emergency, it may work when cells may all go down. FOr example if something ( economic collapse, act of war... ) were to knock power out for a year, the land line could still work. ( assuming the phoneco, being it's an emergency service, could have backup power ) So we could use an old mechanical phone ( we still keep two of them here, because of that ) and if we had a solar panel here, might even be able to get online during the day.

I'm hooked into some intel sources and yes, we'd better be "prepping" and thinking strategically this way, because we will be facing a global economic collapse at some point, the likes of which has never been seen in history.

[chpalmer]

I think so, but we tried them for TV service years ago and they stank too. So we went to DirecTV, which we're pretty happy with, except for the $130 a month.

The ONLY real advantage with a land line phone is that, during a national emergency, it may work when cells may all go down. FOr example if something ( economic collapse, act of war... ) were to knock power out for a year, the land line could still work. ( assuming the phoneco, being it's an emergency service, could have backup power ) So we could use an old mechanical phone ( we still keep two of them here, because of that ) and if we had a solar panel here, might even be able to get online during the day.

I'm hooked into some intel sources and yes, we'd better be "prepping" and thinking strategically this way, because we will be facing a global economic collapse at some point, the likes of which has never been seen in history.

Id check cable for internet only if I were in your position...

[Melissa2012B]

http://www.internetwithoutlimits.com/

[YARDofSTUF]

I've had Comcast for years. The speeds are great, I keep my PC running virus and malware free and am always within 10-15% of my max speed even during peak hours.

Never hit the 250 GB monthly cap, best I've done so far is about 140 GB. I watch all my TV over the net, watch videos, play games, download and try out various linux distros.

Upload speed is fine unless you plan to be uploading 100 MB+ files.

[CenturyLinkHelp]

Hi Melissa. My name is Joey and I'm with CenturyLink. I'm very sorry to read about the troubles you've been having with your service and would be glad to look into this for you. We just ask that you email us at TalkToUs@CenturyLink.com with your account information and details on the issue like you've posted above. We'll do all we can to help you, or anyone else on this thread that needs assistance. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.

Joey H
@CenturyLinkHelp Team