Internet providers in Bristol/Bluff City area (Kingsport: neighborhood, price)

[crowebird13]

Will be moving into the area at the end January and was looking for a reliable ISP. So far I have found Charter, Centurylink, and BTES. Any thoughts on these or any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.

[Jim37680]

I have heard good things from friends that are fortunate enough to have BTES which is fiber-to-the-premises everywhere that BTES is the electrical power provider. They provide TV and phone also on this all fiber system. Speed ought to be best of the three I would think.

I have CenturyLink which is only DSL and availability and speed depends on wire-line distance to the DSLAM remote serving you. My service has been fine with the 10 Meg download but I am only about 8000' feet from the DSLAM. Upload is only around 700 kb which is a pain for uploading HD video content but probably doesn't bother most folks (except me).

Charter is Charter. They attract a lot of folks with their triple bundle here in Kingsport. I'm not sure of their footprint up around Bristol. Their distribution is only fiber-to-the-neighborhood everywhere around here so speed will vary depending upon local traffic in the hood.

[Ted Bear]

I use Comcast for ISP, Phones and TV. It was the last thing in the world I wished to do, but it was available in my location, and they made the price attractive.

Comcast customer service is second to none in terms of horrible. They didn't even know they could provide service at my location, even though my neighbors have their service.

My concern (home based business that uses a LOT of bandwidth) was about reliability. I have to say it has been very good. In two years I have had only one meaningful service interruption.

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I've been using Charter for several years. There have been a few interruptions in service. The most recent was some sort of an email server problem. It's patched, but not fixed. They are expensive if you also get TV and customer service varies from very good to very poor. The bigger issue is the Tri-Cities doesn't have a top tier internet service provider like many other areas of the state. We want to be a tech and trade area but don't have top of the line infrastructure. I think the trend is moving toward using the providers for Internet and online providers for TV. The providers are likely to begin metering bandwidth changes as they lose more TV subscribers.