best internet company in LR

[Josie861]

I'm not in AR (moving there soon), so I can't comment on the cable providers.. but.. have you considered your Cellular Phone carrier? Many now offer wireless or tethered (your cell phone connected with a cable to the computer) internet service.. The speed is comparable or faster than DSL and the plans are usually lots cheaper than Cable. ... Just a thought.. Good Luck!

[StygianAgenda]

At home, where I host my domain Moderator cut: edit I use comcast's fastest consumer package.

At my co-worker's house, where we've been tying into work over a VPN connection for the last 2 months, nightly, he uses AT&T's fastest package.

On average, I'm getting roughly 4 times the speed at my home location compared to my co-worker's AT&T connection.

Now, lets dig a little deeper here. For consumer (home) connections, Comcast totally slaughters the competition. On the other hand, if your looking for business class services, AT&T has many more offerings, but along with that comes their 1980's pricing plans. To put this into perspective, I work for the state government, and we lease a 200Mbit optical connection via AT&T and it costs us about $9000 per month with no per Gigabyte limits. I recently checked into a T1 connection from AT&T and the pricing is still way above what it should be based on what others are offering. Consider also that AT&T's network is one that has been repeatedly upgraded and has many points along their net that have varying degrees of thru-put, such as the link between Little Rock to St. Louis (run a trace route to get the average time between router hops). Comcast's network is a private, nation wide WAN, and while they do implement traffic shaping protocols (which hampers P2P & torrent apps), there are ways around that Moderator cut: edit
In the end, decide what works best for you. If you only have 1 to 2 computers, DSL is adequate. If your like me, and host 16 computers at home, then you will probably want to look at either a comcast high-speed package, or if you can afford it, go for a leased line connection.

It really hinges on what you want to be able to do with the connection. For instance, I have inbound VPN access here at home so that I can tie into my network remotely and control any system on my network, and this is setup so that I can maintain at least 5 inbound VPN connections in parallel. I also host 23 website, an IRC network (hub, services, and 1 leaf node), a Teamspeak VOIP server, a PMRef (Cuseeme compatible) video conferencing server, and several other low bandwidth services from my comcast connection. Since I work as a network administrator and do all of my own tech support, I've only had to call comcast once... to have them provision my MAC address when I moved to my new house, and that took about 5 minutes since I knew the right lingo to get the 1st tier support to put me thru to a network engineer that just fixed it up while we chatted about linux based routers.

Personally, I wish there were a lot more competition for carriers here, but with the FCC removing the restrictions from AT&T that forced them to open their switching centers (for Verizon, for example), now we are seeing less ISPs able to stay in business. It's pretty much just the opposite of what it was 7 years ago when there were more ISPs than one could keep up with.