Topsham Communications

When I first moved to the area and had the service installed, it was great during the day. 5:30 PM - 11 PM not so much. Turns out they had a peering issue upstream which affected all of their customers. Once that was resolved, the service for me at least has been fine. I don't pay attention to it anymore, no one in the house complains about it. Out of sight, out of mind. Is it expensive? Sure $187/mo for 20Mbps symmetrical. Both of us work from home and couldn't do that without reliable internet. We've had a couple of outages here and there but nothing lasts more than 10 hours. For that, we have a cellular backup. So after all of that, why did I rate them so well when on the surface of things it's expensive, slow and unreliable? A: Is it though? Sure I'm paying the same amount for what I would get from a larger provider in a metropolitan area A: Do you REALLY need more than 20Mbps? I mean please give this some thought. You can stream NetFlix reliably and in really good quality at 5-7Mbps. I've had 1Gbps links, I've had 10Gbps links (Yes. yes I have.) It takes a little bit of adjustment, but at the end of the day, we're quite satisfied with 20Mbps. We can stream multiple NetFlix and Hulu sessions at a time with really good quality. Listening to music online is a non-issue. Playing games online is fine too, latency is not directly related to throughput and we get fantastic latency in single digit. A: Given the challenging environment we're in I think they do a fairly good job at preserving their infrastructure - at least that's the outward appearance. The outages have been either during or immediately following a significant storm and there were power outages during these events as well. Customer service really is quite good. I've spoken to them on many occasions. They know who I am and they know what I do for a living. I've worked with their tech support and they're pretty sharp. Their install crew is pretty good too. I'm able to have a conversation with them about networks and routing without having to break out the crayons and scratch paper. I think they should have caught their problem I was experiencing when I first had the service activated on their own and probably much faster. A customer shouldn't have been the one to troubleshoot and identify a problem in their entire network - but this is what I do for a living. So, I think these guys deserve a chance and they also deserve a really fair review which reflects how I truly feel. They provide a much-needed service to our community and I'm happy to be a customer.