Meeped: Day 25

When last we visited the topic of my Comcast-to-Road Runner forced march, we had established that speeds were roughly comparable to what we had before, but Road Runner's SMTP servers were unusable except from a Road Runner-assigned IP address. By itself, this was enough to send me shopping for alternatives, but when our next Time-Warner bill arrived with a $17 price increase to our phone service The Brothers' fate was sealed.

Last Wednesday, we switched to Grande Communications, a small-ish company serving 48 francise areas in Texas (including [ahem] Midland and Odessa). In a rare stroke of luck, it turns out that they've just started providing cable internet (as opposed to DSL) in our neighborhood in the last six weeks.

Their technician came out when we were told he would and efficiently installed yet another box on the side of our house ("Collect them all!"). When asked if Grande was getting a lot of business that Time-Warner apparently doesn't want, he grinned shyly and said, "Yessir, that's a fact."

Within an hour, our cable TV and internet were switched over and working, but the phone won't be switched over until Time-Warner turns loose of our phone number. That's scheduled to happen tomorrow, and the cables should be buried sometime before Turtle and I head off to parts uncharted for Christmas.

The bottom line

• Not counting Time-Warner's $17 price hike for the phone service, we're paying about $50/month less for the same service tiers as we had with Comcast and Time-Warner.
  
• Grande's speeds are a bit faster in both directions than Road Runner's were.
  
  
• Grande's SMTP servers can be used from outside their IP range. All you have to do is pull your mail from the POP server first.* I can live with that.
  
• Our cable TV lineup is essentially the same as with Time-Warner with one notable and unfortunate exception: Outdoor Life Network (a.k.a. Versus). That means that I'll just have to make do with such Tour de France coverage as I can find on the internet—unless Turtle hits it big and we can afford to move up to the digital cable package.
  

* A side note: a day after the switch, I finally got a follow-up e-mail from Road Runner tech support, in which the author confidently assured me that most ISPs required their subscribers to be within their IP range to use their SMTP servers. "Most" meaning "only Road Runner", I guess. It was also explained to me that my best solution would be to just use another SMTP server to send my tx.rr.com e-mails, when I was away from the house.

I'm so glad I no longer own Time-Warner stock.