We have had AT&T DSL for years. We live in a rural area and at initial installation, we were told we would not have good service and couldn't expect more than 760 kb/sec. Service has been deteriorating and during the last (rare) snowstorm, it stopped altogether. It took several phone calls and two site visits to get it restored, but still I couldn't get any better than 400 kb/sec.
During our problems, I called a neighbor who hat AT&T to see if he had service. He told me he had converted to HomeFusion and was very happy. We took the plunge and switched cell service to Verizon and signed up for HomeFusion. There has been a night and day difference! We're seeing >10mb/sec down and almost 6 mb/sec up!
Before ordering, I checked this community and other sites on the web to find user experiences. What I found here and elsewhere caused me some concern, but I tried to put comments in perspective. I've decided to post a little guide for prospective customers based on my experience.
[b ]Manage your expectations[/b] - I'm sure you are considering HomeFusion because you live in a rural area and you have few, if any alternatives. You won't get cable or fiber speeds and you won't have unlimited data usage.
[b]Know your data usage needs [/b] - With our slow DSL, we never could stream movies. We also don't play online games. There's just two of us at home and we mostly just surf the internet and do software updates. We do not plan to stream, even though we now have the ability. I read a customer complain that since he had such great speeds, his data usage went way up and he thought they should have warned him about it! Take responsibility for your usage, folks!
[b]Stay on top of your data usage and try to prevent "ghost" usage[/b] - I monitor my usage daily, especially now in the beginning, to make sure I get no nasty surprises. I've turned off all automatic updates. Instead of leaving my desktop computers running, I now turn them off when not in use. I also did something I should have done a long time ago. I set up and sign on to a user account that does not have administrative privileges. This is one of the best ways to prevent virus attacks that opens your computer up to sending data.
I know this is the "honeymoon" period, but based on my experiences, I would recommend the service. Forums like this usually are skewed to the negative, I wanted to add some balance.
