ISP and why.

Comcast - My reasoning has to due with their 250 gigabyte cap. They're capping end users at 250 gigabytes while selling transit bandwidth for under $4/megabit on the market. Hence the only logical reason is to protect their TV and VOD markets.

The worst ISP I've ever used was Verizon DSL.

At first they were good, I got my service activated on a federal holiday (4th of July), and it worked just as I had expected.
After a few weeks though, my service started degrading, I would get disconnected a few times a week for a few seconds, then back online. Still not that big of a deal for $20/m. But it got progressively worse to the point of where I was only online for a few minutes a day, and by that I mean the modem would connect for 5 seconds, lose the connection and not be able to reconnect for hours.

Their tech support was clearly less competent to handle it than me, at the time I was running Ubuntu and they told me things such as "You can only use our DSL with Windows", which is false, they officially supported Mac, even though that's irrelevant, (I eventually started lying and saying I had Windows 2000). Every time I called they wanted me to restart my modem, even though I told them I had just done it, there was never a manager or supervisor, they were always on break or at a shift change, or something.

And I had a contract, so eventually I got pissed and told them I wanted to deactivate my service, and they informed me that I had to pay a $175 fee to do so, so I told them that either they make my 'service' usable by sending a technician out to my home and figuring it out or they give me my money back for the last 2 months and waive the fee. The agreed, the technician came and said it was nothing on my end, and there was nothing he could do. I got the refund and the waiver!

Fun times.

I've never had any other (home) ISP than Road Runner or Verizon, and Road Runner has actually been a pretty good ISP short of the price, so that's all I have to say.

I can only really comment on the 3 ISP's i've had, and even the best isn't the greatest. The point is that americanized control over bandwidth and internet usages (speeds and such) will always be below what they could truly offer. My first ISP (dialup) was MidMaine Communications -- they actually were pretty good, but it was dial-up, so fail no matter who the ISP was. Then I had this local wireless provider who jabbed $60 our of us every month for a truly weak signal. Now I have Time Warner, and I can't overly complain, but a little. I subscribe to turbo internet, and I wish my speeds were faster. Through the router it's nothing special and on wireless even more special (but like down sydrome), but the thing that irks me the most is their crappy upload speeds. I get 100kbs MAX, and that's pretty horrific because when I am on campus at Umaine I can get 800 average. I think Comcast is worse though. Time Warner's support is pretty decent, and their paying online scheduler is decent.

Verizon Wireless. I have their National Broadband access thingy, which get terrible d/l and u/l speeds as well as usually high latencies. It will at random times cut you off-line and at random times (usually once a month) cut you off to the point where you have to re-install the drivers for the broadband card to work right again.

When i had Windows Updates option turned on, it required all updates to be installed or it refused to work right. I got another line added onto my server trying to get the same exact plan. Which they now do not offer. They offer another plan at the same price ($59.99, which is about $60.09 after discounts and taxes) for only 5 GB BANDWIDTH. I got charged $326 overage charge for using 6.79 GB. Nice. Really effing nice. Thanks a bunch Verizion Wireless ^_^