Speed and reliability... best ISP ?

[stilly]

I ran a speed test tonight and saw I was 832kb down and 340kb up.

I was pretty pissed so I called up my ISP and asked what the deal was (I thought they capped my speed because of my late payment snafu) she had me turn off the modem and restart it after a moment or two and it came back up to 6mb down and 768kb up...

I was a happy camper again but I was left wondering. Since I am paying $35 a month for this, I wonder if there is a better/faster way to do all of this that costs less or is pretty cheap?

Pretty cheap means I want to keep it at $50 or less for internet but I am willing to go up to about $60 if it gives me WAY faster speeds.

Like, if cable is $60 a month for 20+ MB and I could pay $30-40 for 10-15mb that I would be happy, provided that it was reliable and they did not try to bill me for all of this garbage like Charter does with some people...

So anyone have any diamonds in the rough that they use? Home or business I do not care, I am after reliable speed for the lowest price.

[the86d]

I use FiOS every day, w/out issues, and pay about <~$65/month (on a contract).

Never seems to go down, but I have a cheapo-UPS on the router (which seemed to prevent a lot of "power-cycle-needed" issues on the DI-604, DI-624, MI424WR [older-rev] FiOS routers).

The drawback to using a FiOS router is that they know your SSID and passphrase, which is a privacy-thing in my book, and I don't use the ones on the bottom of the router, I changed them immediately, but they know both:


You are REALLY limited by where you live and who owns that area's phone and cable service, so before I moved into 2 rented houses, I first checked to make sure they had FiOS availability, then I made sure that the home I bought had FiOS also... I have had FiOS for a LONG time, but I had to cancel service to not get raped by the TV and phone service (each costs like 30-50/month, not to mention the equipment rental fees with other providers are lower for HD per TV) when all I needed was an Internet connection. The wouldn't lower the bill if you dropped one or two services unless you cancel service and resign-up with Internet-only.