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 Review by krenim191 
Posted: 198 days ago
member for 7.8 years, 2850 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Wellsboro,Tioga,PA
 $56 per month (month by month)
 about 5 days
 "Fast, Consistant Speeds, Low Pings"
 "None so far"
 "Not bad for living in the middle of nowhere"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
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Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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Well lets start off with the back story. I got a promotion at work that required me to work from the corporate headquarters... an 84 mile round trip from where I was living. With the cost of gas and the 10 hours a week of my life it was taking away I decided to relocate.
If you've ever visited the north central part of Pennsylvania - you'll no doubt agree with me that it is beautiful... but populated it isn't! Welcome to Mayberry - er, Wellsboro, PA that is. Population ~4000, also the county seat of Tioga County (just to give you an idea of how populated the rest of the county is). Colonial gas lamps line the center of the main streets, well manicured lawns everywhere you look, Main Street is full of little shops and restaurants. That's all fine and well - but what is the broadband going to be like here!?!?!
To my surprise - it's pretty damn good. Much faster service than I was getting with my Verizon DSL service 42 miles to the south.
I ordered the service in February 2008 - it's now May and I think that has given me enough time to fully test the services.
My cable company is Blue Ridge Communications, the ISP that runs the show is PenTeleData. I remember back in the early days of the internet, PTD was quite a powerful local ISP, with some services that were to be envied.
PTD seems to have a pretty solid backbone, with multiple peerings in NY, NJ & MD. Ping times across the board are very low. I subscribe to the 10/800 tier (G10 they call it) and consistently hit my cap. We had a couple of bad ice storms since I've moved here, and all the while I was happily downloading at top speed along with everyone else in the area since nobody could go anywhere.
When the service was first installed, they furnished me with a Webstar modem - it was very flaky and often needed rebooted- within a few days I purchased a Motorola 5120 and haven't had a single problem since.
I have heard of a few people having their service suspended or terminated because of high usage... I'm a heavy user and have yet to receive a letter or phone call. They do provide a tool that tells you how much data you have consumed in a given month and it seems fairly accurate when compared with the monitoring software I use on my PC.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with my new service. That can quickly change though if the service drops below unacceptable levels. I'll be sure to update my review.
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PenTeleData
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