Looking for broadband Internet? Here are some tips to ensure that you can easily get the plan best suited to your individual needs.
Location: Most broadband Internet solutions are reliant upon fairly complex infrastructure to be in place. As such, their availability is very much dependent on location. Generally, urban areas will have better infrastructure than rural areas, and high-end broadband Internet systems like fiber to the home will be largely limited to these urban areas. However, there are exceptions, so check on the options available even if you aren't expecting much. It's entirely possible that your sleepy small town could have access to a blazing-fast fiber network or if that is not the case, you will most likely want to invest in satellite internet. What is available in your area all depends on who's put the money into developing the area in which you live.
Price: Different broadband solutions can be more or less expensive to lay out and maintain. These costs will be passed onto you- in the vast majority of cases a shiny new fiber-optic network will cost far more to use than a DSL line will, which uses the same physical infrastructure as the telephone grid. DSL is almost always the cheapest option if it's available, so if you're on a budget it's probably your best choice. On the other hand, mobile broadband or satellite internet are sometimes more expensive. If you don't have a specific need for the mobile or satellite's benefits (primarily, the ability to use mobile broadband in portable hardware and the massive availability advantage satellite Internet has over all other forms on Internet access, to the point where it's viable even in the depths of the Amazon rainforest) you're generally better served by DSL, cable, or fiber-optic. Cable is relatively cheap and offers substantially better speeds than DSL; it's a popular option where available because of this speed. On the other hand, while fiber-optic connections are very expensive they also have breathtaking download and upload speeds; as such, a fiber-optic connection is worth taking advantage of if you have a stable, fairly high income.
Provider quality: Different Internet service providers will have differing consumer impressions, even where they offer the same type of technology. For instance, Comcast offers a cable Internet service, which is generally well worth going for. However, Comcast is also notorious for its shoddy customer service and obscene pricing, to the point where "Comcastic" has entered common parlance as a term meaning "very, very bad"; what this means is that, if other options are available, you may want to consider a service which you wouldn't normally. With Comcast's fairly small download caps, if you're making heavy use of your connection you may get better speeds overall with a DSL line featuring a lower advertised speed. It's an unfortunate fact of the broadband market in the United States that there generally isn't an overabundance of options for the same broadband service in an area; generally, if a sub-par ISP like Comcast is present, they'll be your only cable (or DSL, etc.) ISP.
