Good afternoon,

I was on a promo for Comcast (30 MB down, known as Blast), and called
to get service downgraded since my promo ended and the price nearly
doubled. The guy wanted to charge me a fee to downgrade (I have no
contracts with them)- I pushed back but he wouldn't wave it so I plan
on speaking to a manager later. I have been putting off shopping for
Internet providers since I last tried Qwest DSL in 2008 (it was no
where near the speed they advertised when I was living near downtown,
so I stayed with Comcast). The audacity for Comcast to charge for
downgrading service, combined with their already high prices has
pumped some motivation into me to look at broadband providers again.

Is anyone using Century Link or USI Wireless? I don't believe we have
any other options in Minneapolis for broadband (Clear doesn't appear
to be an option for my usage). Unfortunately I'm on the wrong side of
35W for USI fiber to be option. I don't do video streaming (aside from
short news stories) but may pick this up again in the future at some
point.  I occasionally work from home over VPN, which makes me a
little nervous with USI and the reviews I've read. At our house we
mostly do a lot of intensive web browsing and publishing, ssh (inbound
and outbound), and a small amount of RDP traffic outbound, light
gaming (Steam), and occasional large downloads (mostly Linux iso's /
packages, and Steam games). I do use CrashPlan in Linux for frequent
backups, so anything capped low (like Clear 4G) could present a
problem- no worry about longer upload backup times, it runs as a
service in the background and I can throttle it.

How has USI been recently? Is it worth even trying? I'm in south
Minneapolis and the nearest node is two blocks away, which is another
potential drawback. Does anyone have Century Link that could provide
some feedback about it?

Someone also mentioned Clear 4G recently. My concern with that (and
the other providers) is capping bandwidth, which everyone does to some
extent, but Clear seems really low (40 GB), which might be a problem
with CrashPlan.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions / feedback.

--
Jeremy MountainJohnson
Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com