So I had some time today and decided to test every phone number I could (anything on TOAST.net’s partner networks). The results are below (yes, I used Excel; grab OpenOffice if you can’s read an XLS file). They represent several hours of work, a few hours off of my backup dialup account and a fair amount of data entry. Hope it’s worth something to someone :)

Highlights:

  1. PAETEC (network C) actually has a decent network around here, with pretty much everything getting handed off to Level3 in short order
  2. GlobalPOPs (network G, the preferred one) is most likely crappy, routing everything up to New jersey on high-latency networks before heading out to the internet
  3. Verizon/UUNet (network V) is cool, but not the best performing ofthe bunch. Then again, Verizon has better things to worry about (FiOS for example)
  4. Level3 was networks I, L and Q this time around. As expected, network latency was great, though performance was middling.
  5. AT&T WorldNet was consistently the best dialup experience out of anyone. I wouldn’t use them exclusively since there are plenty of places where they don’t have access numbers, but every connection I made with their modems was nice and fast, with modem compression working to deliver a really-and-truly halfway-decent internet experience without even requiring an accelerator.
  6. Either the Toshiba Softmodem is high-quality, the lines are great around here, or both. Then again, when hurricanes wash equipment away every so often, you have to fix it ;)

So as I was saying, here are the goods. Comment with your thoughts, or your own tests! If you like what you see, give me a PeoplePC account  so I can try out Earthlink’s network performance :)

Dialup in Fort Pierce FL