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We at MTS have been working on the internet since the early days of the ARPANET (circa 1986). Since those days, we have worked with numerous service providers. Some have been helpful and useful; others haven't. Our purpose here is not to discourage you from using any ISP, but to give you anecdotal commentary on our experience to help you decide on the best ISP for your particular needs.
In the Northeast Ohio area, there are several cable providers who offer internet access. Our only experience to date has been with Adelphia. Our own line is provided by them. Overall we are pleased with the product. The speed of the line is wonderful. Unfortunately there has been occasional loss of service. In addition, the customer service is not up to par in our opinion. We must admit that we were among the first to get connected to this service when it was first released in 2001, so we expected some "bumps". We continue to take a wait and see attitude, but overall, it has been a pretty good solution and a very good value (excellent performance at reasonable prices). If you need a dedicated line that gives consistent and reliable service with no downtime, then DSL may be a better choice.
Obviously there are a large number of people who have used AOL and as a result, we have had numerous encounters with AOL's products and their customer service. The customer service has often been wonderful, but overall, the customer experience with the AOL product has not. Frequent busy signals and disconnects seem to be the norm. In addition, AOL has repeatedly been so slow to market with Mac-based software that we tend to discourage our customers from using this ISP.
We recently (late 2001) setup our website on the servers of Carol Johnson & Company in Florida. So far, this has been a very good experience. Great customer service. No outages that we know of and very reasonable prices. Currently they impose a limit to e-mail attachments that we feel is uncomfortably low, but that alone is the only bad spot in an otherwise excellent experience. If you decide to contact them, we would love it if you told them you heard of them from us.
Second only to AOL, this is one of the big players in internet service. We have had an Earthlink account for many years and have had the typical disconnect problems which are associated with dial-up. They have excellent customer service. They are fast to respond to overloaded circuits (when busy signals become frequent they add more lines). They have great Macintosh support. We have numerous clients with Earthlink DSL service that have had little or no problems.
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