Have you tried Taylor co-op’s fiber? They got out to me about a year ago. Haven’t had a noticeable outage in that time and I get 500 mbps up and down for about $50 per month.Two of the dirty secrets: 1) If you threaten to change service, many will reduce the cost. 2) They can "open up" the speed (as much as twice as fast) at no additional charge for the same reason - Charter is notorious for limiting the bandwidth until you threaten to change service.
One problem many of us deal with is a dearth of options once you get so many miles out of town. For example, in Abilene, there is Pioneer, AT&T, and a couple of others. As a result, there is competition for price, speed, and service.
Once you get so far out of town, the options become Westex Connect and Kinetics (formerly Windstream) which really means ONE option. Do not even try Kinetics unless you have no other options as it is expensive, slow, and unreliable. On top of that, they charge a rental fee for the modem. You can buy your own modem but if you do, you are entirely on your own when it comes to hooking up and troubleshooting.
We have had Westex Connect for 3-4 years and I can only remember a couple of outages. They are prompt, courteous, and, mostly, local.
Finally, when Verizon was transitioning to Pioneer, I read up on it. Two issues stood out: almost impossible to drop service and their customer service is chaotic at best. The upshot about Pioneer is: good luck.
Go to this website and run a test. It will give you a good idea of what you are really getting up and down.I have spectrum supposedly 200mps and it's 80 bucks. I have problems playing cod sometimes lol
LOL! And suddenlink wants you sign up for land line and mobile service. Not likely!My fiber optic internet comes from the electric co-op. I pay $49.99/month for 500 Mbps up and down with no data limits or throttling. I used to have Suddenlink's 1Gig service which started out pretty good. We never got anywhere close to a Gig but in the beginning it was pretty quick. All the neighbors complained about shitty internet that got worse every time someone else signed up for Suddenlink. Once I wasn't the newest house on Suddenlink anymore, our internet was horrible. Extremely slow and unreliable connectivity and then the price increases started.