Posted May 18, 201015 yr We live in Cincinnati and have Cincinnati Bell. Well, after a long talk with the Mr. I have found out that he is LIVING A LIE! Oh, Gad. I weep with frustration. He has a wall plug which is actually broadband. It is called something like "Connectivity" and he has been using that to hook us into broadband downstairs through a router. It works well but it is $40/month. He has msn.com which is $19.99/month. This allows him to have his e-mail address as [email protected] as his e-mail address. But he also has Outlook Express which he has paid for and it doesn't work. Oh, don't ask me why. He has Cincinnati Bell: landline, Zoomtown (and Fuse.net), my Blackberry Curve (which is on a 'service agreement' until March 2011 whatever than means...they swear it's not a contract but I think they will come to your house and beat you up if you try to get out of it early) and his toy cell phone (which he carries at times but never turns on) and all that stuff is $145/month. So we are paying over $200/month to a variety of oddballs and Cincinnati Bell for a motley mass of telecomm services. I have not turned the Zoomtown ethernet line on in months. I use my landlady's wifi at the office (it's part of my rent) and the wireless netbook at home which runs through the Connectivity wall plug and lets me collect and send e-mails. Here is what I want: -High Speed Internet which I can use wirelessly -e-mail -iPhone Here is what he wants: -High speed internet -I will be damned if I can figure out what the second thing is. Can you help me out here? What the heck should I look for, what the heck should I do? Aieeee!
May 18, 201015 yr Is a new husband out of the question? Short of that, how about Time-Warner? Waiting this morning for TW to come and replace my zoomtown and phone with internet phone and roadrunner. We already have cable through them. All of this for ~$125/month. We hardly use our landline, and it was just too expensive. I would have just added DirectTV, but we have too many trees. Our cells are through Verizon.
May 18, 201015 yr $19.99/month just for an MSN email address!?!?!??!?!?!?!? Get Gmail. It's better and it's free. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the Connectivity plug being $40/month. Is it Zoomtown that is $40/month?
May 18, 201015 yr Basically, yes. I think it started out as a fancy browser in 1997 a d now it is just an address. For all I know, he is the only person still on it. How embarassing. I think I convinced him to give it up.
May 18, 201015 yr Stick with the phone company. That TW garbage will not work if your electric is out. They pay there employees minimum wage so you get minimum wage service. Get rid of the msn thing, Gmail is free and better. Get what is called zooomtown lite or what is known as naked DSL. Buy a cheap wireless router and plug your dsl into it. This highspeed internet bundled with your wireless phones plan can be real cheap. I get two phones where i share a thousand minutes a month (free minutes to all Cincinnati bell home and wireless phones) for $60 a month. DSL is $20. Buy a used iphone (unlocked) and put your sim card in it. 1997? seems like yesterday.
May 18, 201015 yr Heh. The first question, the plug is an item which was peddled door to door in Mt. Lookout. It is just a plug which goes into an electrical outlet and that is how the internet flows to you. It isn't very popular, obviously, but it does exist because we have one. To own the plug is $40/month. It actually is very fast and it does work well with our router. I think it might well be faster than Zoomtown, but the computer on which I use Zoomtown could really use my cleaning out a few places on it to speed things up so that might be unfair of me to say that. Yes, that is what it boils down to, $19.99/month for an MSN e-mail address. I think that is insane but that's just me. He does have a Hotmail account and a Hotmail address but he does not want to give up the MSN address. I just have to work on him more, I actually got him saying that he could lose the MSN fee. By the way, I got to the bottom of the CBW no contract plan. They pro-rate a penalty for cancelling early. The penalty starts at $150 and goes down every month you keep your phone system with CBW. So, if you wanted to quit CBW when you had 11 months to go, you would pay somewhere around $70 to get out of it. I just asked a guy at the Phone Store about that.
May 18, 201015 yr Heh. The first question, the plug is an item which was peddled door to door in Mt. Lookout. It is just a plug which goes into an electrical outlet and that is how the internet flows to you. It isn't very popular, obviously, but it does exist because we have one. To own the plug is $40/month. It actually is very fast and it does work well with our router. I think it might well be faster than Zoomtown, but the computer on which I use Zoomtown could really use my cleaning out a few places on it to speed things up so that might be unfair of me to say that. Yes, that is what it boils down to, $19.99/month for an MSN e-mail address. I think that is insane but that's just me. He does have a Hotmail account and a Hotmail address but he does not want to give up the MSN address. I just have to work on him more, I actually got him saying that he could lose the MSN fee. By the way, I got to the bottom of the CBW no contract plan. They pro-rate a penalty for cancelling early. The penalty starts at $150 and goes down every month you keep your phone system with CBW. So, if you wanted to quit CBW when you had 11 months to go, you would pay somewhere around $70 to get out of it. I just asked a guy at the Phone Store about that. The "plug" is likely just bringing your Zoomtown connection from the main computer/router to the other room. (Not being from Cincinnati, I am assuming Zoomtown is the name of the ISP's service.) Whatever the case, you shouldn't pay anything monthly for this. This can be achieved with an ethernet cable, putting a wireless bridge upstairs (assuming your router does wireless, if not buy one, they're cheap), or, yes, getting something which will transmit the internet signal from your router through your electrical wiring. But you can pick those up at Best Buy for under $100, one time charge. You should not be paying monthly for that, especially not $40/month. Also, the service can only be as fast as your connection to the outside world through your router, so the reason one computer's internet connection seems slower than the other is likely the computer itself, not the internet service.
May 18, 201015 yr Yea, I figure that was the case. I had been running that computer non stop for a long time and it had to have picked up a good deal of detritus. I have to clean it out. The name of the plug in the wall is a Current Broadband by Concentric. It is actually a modem because his computer did not have a modem (according to him). We are using that and the broadband from Concentric to run the wireless system which is a Concentric wireless system. It is "beamed out" to the wireless computer by the router it is hooked up to. The one upstairs is hardwired through CintiBell and I think we could drop it if we wanted to and not see any difference as long as I changed all of my e-mail addresses to Google mail or HotMail addresses.. I can run that one through the hard wire (cincinnati Bell) or through the router (Concentric) and still get on the internet and go around as usual. Honestly I have not paid much attention to the Concentric plug because I don't pay for it, he found it and liked it and wants to keep it. I just think we could get out from under the DSL line from Cincinnati Bell and not feel the difference if we plan on handling the e-mail address issue first.
May 19, 201015 yr My parents in the Dayton area have CinBell for home phone, mobile (500m, unlimited txt), and Zoomtown for about 89 bucks a month (after taxes). I myself gave up on CinBell mobile (after 10 years) for an iPhone on AT&T. But I still use them for FiOptics TV and Internet. If FiOptics is in your area, TW really can't compete with it... "It's just fate, as usual, keeping its bargain and screwing us in the fine print..." - John Crichton
May 19, 201015 yr I myself gave up on CinBell mobile (after 10 years) for an iPhone on AT&T. Do you have issues with dropped calls downtown? I saw a post on another thread from an iPhone user saying that he always has dropped calls in the Clifton area. Several members on my team at work have iPhones, and I've never heard them mention dropped calls. They really like their phones.
May 19, 201015 yr For what it's worth, there are places which are Dead Zones for CBW as well. The area around Ault Park is one of them (after all the deer don't use CBW equipment) and so since I live on the lunatic fringe of Ault Park, my coverage is not as good as other people's AND I am sure that goes for AT&T as well (when I look at their map and CBW's map I see almost a cut out around my house and Ault Park). And I am sure that is not going to change (can you imagine the br00-ha-ha if a cell tower were erected around Ault Park). So, that is a fact of life I will have to deal with.
May 19, 201015 yr Do you have issues with dropped calls downtown? I saw a post on another thread from an iPhone user saying that he always has dropped calls in the Clifton area. Several members on my team at work have iPhones, and I've never heard them mention dropped calls. They really like their phones. I don't think I've had one dropped call while downtown. There are data issues though. Slowness from mid-morning through late afternoon. Occasionally during that time frame the connection will timeout. The Starbucks WiFi comes in handy at times. Also, there is an AT&T app that allows you to identify where you have a dropped call, no connectivity, etc. "It's just fate, as usual, keeping its bargain and screwing us in the fine print..." - John Crichton
May 20, 201015 yr The first question, the plug is an item which was peddled door to door in Mt. Lookout. It is just a plug which goes into an electrical outlet and that is how the internet flows to you. It isn't very popular, obviously, but it does exist because we have one. To own the plug is $40/month. It actually is very fast and it does work well with our router. I think it might well be faster than Zoomtown, but the computer on which I use Zoomtown could really use my cleaning out a few places on it to speed things up so that might be unfair of me to say that. There were door to door sales people on the westside of town about 5 years ago selling something call "Current" from Duke, or might have been Cinergy at the time. Same concept as what you explained, but it used to be 19.99 and download speeds used to suck from what I remember.
May 21, 201015 yr That is what it was! It is now $40/mo but it does not suck. I have used it and it's a lot better than it used to be.
May 21, 201015 yr It sounds like you are paying for 3 different internet connections. Once for Zoomtown, once for MSN, and once for Current. The MSN is outdated. Get rid of it. My bet is if you call to cancel, they will try to have you keep it for a lower cost...I guess it depends on how attached he is to his email address. He could try to see if they will let him keep it for free. Current...if you pay for it monthly, get rid of it. Plug the router into a Zoomtown plug. You should have a modem from Zoomtown. Plug a wireless router into that and zoom away. Or get Roadrunner.
May 21, 201015 yr Well we did finally get rid of MSN, that was a struggle. The Current plug is actually a good deal faster than the Zoomtown we have so we are going to take a look at that set up (they offer a phone too). I think we will probably end up getting rid of Cincinnati Bell but we shall see about that ultimately. WE are going to end up with one high speed internet. Just arm wrestling about it now.
May 21, 201015 yr Can you try a bandwidth speed test with the same computer on Current and Zoomtown? http://www.speedtest.net/
May 21, 201015 yr I don't think you have to have MSN to keep the email account anymore. MSN is like the old AOL. Not sure why anyone would use it. Get TWC's Road Runner, it's very fast (much faster than Zoomtown) and isn't too expensive. You can even talk them into giving you the fastest connection for free for a few months, not that you'll really notice a difference. Then get an email account at hotmail, google (privacy concerns), or yahoo for free. Outlook will work with hotmail but not the others. Once you get TWC buy a wireless router that you'll be able to use your iPhone to connect to it while at home. I have a landline but only for safety reasons if the power goes out.
May 21, 201015 yr Well, that was an eyeopener. Thank you for suggesting I do that. Fuse.net Download-4.43 mb/s upload-.81 mb/s mp3-10 sec video-1 min movie-24min Results > average Level 3 download-2.61 mb/s upload-3.27 mb/s ping-21 mp3-16 sec video-2 minutes movie-41 minutes Result< average Fuse is faster on the download, but slower on the upload. Looks like the pwn everything else. Oakiehigh or cincySal, how do you like Time Warner's service?
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