 Review by g0nepostal 
UPDATED: 76 days ago
member for 7.5 years, 1854 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Concord,Contra Costa,CA
 $25 per month (12 month contract)
 about 7 days
 "Reliable service, very few outages"
 "Services servers slow, tech support is average"
 "Not a bad ISP for the tech savvy, others think twice"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I have had Astound Broadband for about four years now after ditching Comcast (Comcast had just taken over ATT Broadband). Thankfully, Concord has the option of either Comcast or Astound for its cable service, so I went with Astound.
Despite some growing pains Astound Broadband has been a pretty good (4/5 stars) ISP. It's connection reliability is excellent: I have had a total of 4 outages - each lasting less than an hour - in two years. Its routing is also not bad at all; we reach most any server in the continental United States in less than 50ms. Since my brother and I do a fair amount of gaming this is important.
An update: Lately Astound's connections past its head end and out on to the Internet have been somewhat flaky - I can ping the network gateway fine but then can't ping hosts on the Internet. Apparently Astound's connection to the Internet is suffering from connectivity issues, so I am downgrading the Connection Reliability rating to a 4 until this is fixed. Thankfully this issue appears to not be a constant problem.
When I first signed up for Astound I signed up for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 Kbps service at $40 a month, bundled with cable TV. Astound now has five different service tiers, with a 6 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up tier for $35 a month when bundled. This is the tier I am on now, and having 1 Mbps for upstream is awesome. I generally get about 92% of the rated speeds whenever I run speed tests, so I am getting what I pay for. Astound recently raised its rates for cable television service, but kept its HSI rates intact.
Growing pains for Astound are evident in its DNS servers, which have a nasty habit of going down or being extremely unresponsive. Because of this I previously used third-party DNS servers from Cisco and Level 3 for my DNS lookups and avoided Astound's DNS servers altogether. Also lacking is Astound's e-mail, which while good at blocking spam has a rather spartan (and confusing) webmail interface.
Update: I had also been using OpenDNS, but I then had some LAN hostname resolution issues - I do not run WINS and rely on broadcast NetBIOS host name resolution for my LAN hosts to speak to one another. For whatever reason when I was using OpenDNS to do our DNS lookups the DNS domain name was getting appended to my local hostnames and I was not able to connect as they would not resolve. I am now back to using Astound's own DNS servers, which resolved my LAN hostname resolution issue. Astound's DNS servers test as being safe against the recently publicized DNS server flaw and are responding quite handily. Kudos to Astound on both.
I've only used tech support a few times, mostly to report outages and slow DNS servers. However, each time I called I spoke to reps who appeared to be using scripts rather than being competent tech support staff. Since this seems to be a standard industry practice I won't downgrade Astound for this but will mark its tech support as average.
Overall, I'd rate Astound a 4/5. It's not a bad ISP; reliability is excellent and the prices are not bad at all. Despite its shortcomings, if you don't mind doing a little work on your own and appreciate reliability Astound is an excellent ISP.
EDIT: The monthly rate for 6 Mbps down / 1Mbps up is $25 when bundled with cable TV, and I recently had a short outage. However, given Astound's connection reliability, $25 a month is not bad at all. 
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Astound Broadband
