Thursday, June 11, 2009

Why I love Digis

[Jason Speaking] So I posted a while back about hating Qwest and how we were moving to Digis to try out their service. I had heard really good and bad things and it seems to be based on where your home is located compared to where the main tower is located.

After having this service for almost 6 months, I wanted to give a review. I love it. Digis is interesting because it is a wireless service. Instead of hard wiring cable or a phone line into your house like Qwest or Comcast, Digis relies on a small wireless hub that they mount to your roof. Our is mounted to our antenna pole. They then run a network cable into your house which then plugs into your computer or router. It's a really straight forward setup that is fairly painless.

Since getting Digis, I have noticed as good of download speeds as I had with Qwest. on Qwest we had a 6-7Mb connection and we receive the same from Digis. The biggest difference is that on Digis's network we get 5Mb download and 2Mb upload, and on Qwest we got 5 Mb download (normally) and a little less than 1Mb upload. For most people this won't matter at all, but for us it was huge.

I do a lot of Bit Torrenting. No I'm not getting illegal software or movies over this. I download LEGAL files and I want them to download super fast so I use bit torrents. Well that upload speed is huge because in the torrenting community if you don't share as much as you download, a lot of services will throttle (slow down) your download speeds. Digis has destroyed Qwest in it's ability to get our files downloaded quicker as a result of the huge upload.

So outside of that, how has it been? Great. We have had no downtimes as far as I can tell. Ashley would tell you otherwise, but it's a result of our router dying and not a result of anything Digis has done. I have not had to call their support for any reasons, except for on the first few days to make sure things were working right, but in those short conversations, I found their customer support to be superb.

Pricing is what makes this the best thing ever. At Qwest we were paying about $65 a month after taxes and fees. At Digis we are paying $40 a month for similar speeds. Now it sucks because Digis charges you $100-140 for installation depending on the deal you come in on, but we made that back in 4 months by saving $25 a month on our bills. Now we are simply saving $25 a month and we love the service.

What are the cons? The cons are that you don't know how well digis will work in your area until you try it out. It's totally based on how close your house is to the main tower in your area. They don't give you a public IP Address for free. You have to pay $5 a month to get a public address. I chose to not get this and have opted to use hamachi when I need to get to it remotely.

So that's my opinion. I love it and I am really glad we purchased it. I just wish we would have switched sooner. What's also cool about them is if you refer people, you can get free internet for a time period. I think each referral that signs up gets you a month free and if you get 5 referrals, you get a year for free. So if you decide to signup after reading this, then PLEASE say that Jason and Ashley Case referred you. We would love this. I think it also gets you a free month if you sign up through a referral. Not sure on that though.

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