[OT] UTOPIA advise

[plug.org at 2nerds.com]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Gary Thornock wrote:
> The 100 GB per month cap is imposed by Utopia

Not true.  Xmission imposes the 100GB monthly quota and will happily
sell more bits to their UTOPIA users for a fee.  You can read all
about it here:

  http://www.xmission.com/cgi-bin/announcements?num=151.new.tiered.service.on.utopia

Xmission also meters their UTOPIA users around the clock; on UTOPIA
there is no such thing as a quota-free overnight period.  Here's what
Xmission support wrote me (typos and all) when I inquired about it in
May, 2006:

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    XMission is not currently able to offer unmeetered 'free download' times
    to our customers on the UTOPIA network. The reason for this is becuase
    XMission is charged for every packet communicated over the UTOPIA
    network. With this being the case we are currently not able to offer
    unmeetered traffic to our customers, and the metered traffic quotas of
    100 gigabytes per month for combined upload and download will be in
    effect after we send out an announcement notifying users.
    All our best
    XMission Tech SUpport
    -----------------------------------------------------------------

After nearly a year's time as an Xmission/UTOPIA customer, my opinion
is mixed.  When it works, which is most of the time, the speed
is wonderful.  But my connection is down far too often--usually for a
few tens of seconds at a time, but sometimes for many minutes at a
time. When I originally installed UTOPIA I had planned to ditch my
Qwest voice line in favor of an Asterisk-friendly VoIP provider.  But
in light of the relatively frequent UTOPIA outages, I wouldn't dare
rely on UTOPIA for voice service.  YMMV, obviously.

FWIW, I've never come close to the 100GB monthly quota, but then
again, I don't run servers.

Chris