High Speed Internet in Iowa City (Coralville, North Liberty: apartment, living in, costs)

[NLDad]

So, I'm moving from North Liberty to Iowa City.

In the process I lose my beloved fiber optic network on southslope, which has been pretty fast for the price and SUPER reliable - never had an outage, except a power outage, in probably 2 years.

So, I know my fastest option available is probably going to be mediacom - but I've heard many horror stories about reliablity in the Iowa City market. My other option would appear to be DSL through Centurylink. When I did their speed available by location estimater thing online it came back with something like blazing fast 7 Mb service....*Gulp*

Anyone have any advice? I had read some stuff that indicated maybe 40Mb service might be available through CenturyLink but I don't see any evidence of that. I'd like 30+Mb ervice, but I don't really want to hassle with resetting stuff every week or so.

What's your experience?

[lurtsman]

NLdad, despite your hatred for all things lurtsman, I'd be happy to help.

Yes, losing Southslope is unfortunate. They are quite arguably the best service in town. I participated in some planning sessions for them and they were much better than mediacom.

Between mediacom and centurylink, your best bet by a mile is centurylink. I had Mediacom for a few years while I lived in North Liberty (Southslope hadn't ran their higher quality lines to our crappy apartment yet). I got centurylink after moving across the country. Centurylink offers promotions to retain existing customers. Mediacom tells them to pound sand. The business structure for telecommunications firms, even though they have been incorrectly classified as information service providers, leads to variable costs of only one to two dollars per month per user, while the vast majority of their costs are independent of user volume. Therefore, it is in their best interest to keep you at even low rates. Mediacom doesn't care. For my internet service, which is about 20down/5up, I've been paying 20 to 35 per month for the last two years as I cycle between promotions. Having ran speeds from 8mbs to 40mbs, I can also say that the difference is not that significant because other factors will delay the speed. If you ran two stop watches with two computers and entered the command at the exact same time, the one that was 40mbs would not finish in 20% of the time, unless the task was downloading a very large file.

[Plainswalker]

I've been living in the Coralville area for 3 years, had Centurylink when it was Qwest.
CenturyLink was far better so far as customer service goes, Mediacom offered the speed I need in the new apartment I moved to (to get out of Coralville's little ghetto...friggin Boston Way.)

When I moved into the place I live in now, CenturyLink only had like 10mb speed and on the phone they had the gall to say "You don't need anything faster," that was the only negative experience I had with them for the year I was able to use them.

Mediacom is a pain in my tush. We called to cancel service and they gave us a permanent discount, but ffs, the cable/internet monopoly crap lets these guys charge exorbitant amounts and lie about speeds. I would also like to know ahead of time what regular service costs... not '29.99 for the first year!'

:/ Only choose Mediacom if CenturyLink does not offer you the connection speed you need.