If you have been getting along with dialup, I would suggest you go with the basic plan that is cheapest, PROVIDING you do not have to sign a contract. That way, you can try it, and if you don't like, you can easily try one of the others. This is such a personal thing, that no one else can tell you what is best for your circumstances.

a million years ago I went from 768 DSL to 3mb DSL .. it was a fairly decent wow...

Not too long ago went from 3mb DSL to 7.1mb DSL .. not much difference in day to day but it is nice for the maybe once a month larger download of that larger sized file... GB and above I would say. Those arent often though..

I always think a bit when I pay the monthly bill,, is it really worth that extra $10 monthly. No, not really for me. But it was my birthday when I ordered it so I'll keep it. Plus it'll cost me somekind of contract cancellation fee to drop back to 3mb.

I have cox cable and opted for the cheapest which was $16. at the time. It's fine, it's fast enough.

I would go with the fastest I could get.

But I'm greedy.

Unless you plan on doing a lot of large down loads I'd go along with what grandma's says.I used to have Cox fastest & now I have Embarq DSL low cost. Works just find for me.

Jim

I have verizon fios which is blazing fast and I absolutely love it, I am dreading making our move because where we are moving they do not have fios and it just breaks my heart. I hate dsl so guess I will be looking at what the cable has to offer.

In our moving quest I did find a super helpful site on a moving company website it is a utilities finder, you plug in your address and it tells you everything available in the area and lets you sign up from there and gives you any bundle rates if they are available, a real impressive site that has been helping me quite a bit as I look at houses online.
available services

RavenCajun - you might want to double check with the providers that you find with the "White Fence" link that you provided. I plugged in my address and none of what they show is actually available to me.

I live in a rural area - so I am sure this has something to do with that....but you might want to double check after finding your options.

RoadRunner for me is tops, and worth every cent!!!!

Same is true here. It shows the bundles offered by our land line phone carrier, none of which is available to us.

The services offered at the link Raven provided is wrong for me too.

It shows 2 different high speed options, neither of which are available out here in this very rural area.

The one and only one that IS available, is not even listed...what a joke!

Thanks everyone.

It looks like we'll try Bridgemaxx- fast enough, I hope (1 mps), cheap enough (2 year plan, ave. $30.00/mo., and veryveryvery convenient to hookup- plug in the "modem" and go to work, also transportable to some degree.

Still time to warn me away if necessary ...

Thanks again,

Mark

about the white fence service, now it will list many but beside them you have to look and see if it indeed says that one is available, for me it was right on, it did list ones that are not but it did say in the list not available over to the side.

Mark, just be wary of a 2 year commitment on a service you have not yet tried, I would ask for a trial period prior to signing that kind of contract and find out the terms if it is broken. I would also do some online searches for info on them and see how well they are liked or disliked. I know BBR forum has forums for many various ISP's you could check there to see if there is one for them.
http://www.dslreports.com/

Also if you will be using just a modem you would do good to go ahead and get a router to put with that modem so you have a good hardware firewall between you and the modem and the internet. I just won't go with a modem alone these days.

and with just a simple google search I found this forum which pretty much says it all LOL
BridgeMaxx Sucks

here are a couple more blogs and several replies, it appears it is all about location with them and just how close you are to one of their towers and what could be blocking you from the tower. Also have read it is a night mare to get out of the contract so heed that warning.
Internet via BridgeMaxx
BridgeMaxx Update

do some googling it is your fiend in these situations.

If Roadrunner cable is available where you are, they have a great deal on RR Light. You won't find it anywhere on their site and its never advertised. I read about it on a local computer site and called to ask about it.

They told me it wasn't much faster than DUN but it's very fast and cut my bill in half from$45 to $20. No contract either. I love it.

Well, we ended up with Bridgemaxx- partly because the contact was straightforward, professional, and very helpful. It is a two year contract but we were "promised" that if we weren't happy they weren't going to make us stick with it. We'll see. Friends in the area have been happy, and that helps.

RR isn't available here. It helps to rememeber that Montana is a big state with a small population. In fact, there's less than a million of us in the entire state, and only Alaska, Texas, and California have more land mass then we. So anybody who goes into business here is going to have to scramble to get enough to keep going!

Thanks again for all the help.

:-M

I have an e-mail friend in Billings and she uses Bresnan. As far as I know she is happy with it. So if the one you chose doesn't work out, you might give that one a try.

I have recently switched from dial-up to DSL offered by AT&T. It has been a big improvement. Both a telephone and internet connection can be supported over the same telephone circuit when a filter on the phone. My connect speed has been 11megabits per second.

One big bonus has been the speedup of huge update downloads. These downloads once required up to 2 hours and might have arrived during two different sessions which adds the probability of errors. Such errors have casued me much grief in the past.

Oh, boy!! I am paying through the nose for my highspeed internet connection with Hughes. I fork over $64 a month. Great service though. I am in a rural area.

I pay $60 per for my Verizon wireless broadband (3G), but it is so much faster than the satellite service that I paid $50 for that it is certainly worth the extra $10. I really doubt that DSL or cable will be available where I live during my remaining lifetime. I'm certainly not holding my breath! LOL!