Bandwidth - More Valuable than Gold!

You've probably heard me/us complain about the speed of our internet before, and how we have had to really scale down our use since moving up here. Actually, I wrote a comparison post before we moved up as part of the research of setting ourselves up for the move.

For the most part, we have been pretty good at staying within our monthly cap - and that is really good for us considering how much we were using in the south. The last while however, have been a little difficult and we usually find ourselves capped out near the end of the month (usually the last day or so). There is a brief phase of misguided optimism where we proclaim indifference to the dial-up speeds - but that usually lasts approx. 10 minutes before we cave and painstakingly try to log into our account and pay for more bandwidth.

Just a glimpse at what we get for what we pay - and before we go any further, I want to clarify that I'm not looking for alternatives for satellite internet or anything like that since we don't want to pay for the dish and deal with the set up. We are sticking to our current provider but just wanted to share what the plans look like.

We currently have the cheapest plan; though at $80 it's really not cheap at all. That gives us 10 GB of bandwidth a month before we are bumped down to dial-up speeds (and they aren't kidding - dial up speeds are enforced the second you hit your cap...and they are so painful). We are looking at 1.5 Mbps as the average speed we typically get. If we want more bandwidth to hold us over to the next month, we can buy them 1 GB at a time for $18 after tax, or upgrade for an extra 5 GB for $53 or 20 GB for $270 (HA!).

Compared to the plan we were on at home (which by no means was the cheapest plan we could have found, but did the job) - we paid about $40 a month for 14 Mbps and 125 GB/month. Huuuuuge difference.

Just wanted to share/shed some light on it since I was just checking our account and noticed that we are 6 days into the month and have used up 1/2 our bandwidth (eek!) - I'm seriously contemplating spending the $50+ to get us an extra 5 GB. Internet is our biggest indulgence here and what keeps us connected to our family and friends, plus allows us to do the things we need to do (ie. everything) so there's no way we could go through the whole month without internet.

To all our geeky friends out there - see? Yours isn't so bad now, is it?? :)

-L