Tag Archives: Eyecom

My latest graduate course started at the beginning of this week. Like all the other distance classes I have taken to date, video feeds from a variety of online sources are a large part of the resource material with which I have to be familiar. This is unfortunate, since our residential internet connection speeds are such that watching streaming video is impossible and even downloading video for later use can take, literally, days. Frustrated after spending almost two hours trying to watch a 2:34 minute video, which I eventually accomplished in 3-4 second bursts, I decided to compare my actual internet speed with what what Eyecom claims to be providing. Part one of that task was relatively easy. A number of online speed tests gave me results of 147 Kbps, 342 Kbps and 53 Kbps, which at best… sucks. Several other testing sites couldn’t even load, because of of poor connection speeds. After this I went to the Telalaska/Eyecom website to see what claims they were making to residential consumers, since I’m pretty sure at one time they actually had numerical values for their connection speeds. Interestingly, they no longer have anything like actual (or claimed) figures on their website. Now broadband customers, for the paltry sum of $79.90/month, are simply offered “three times the connection speed of dial-up.” So, I phoned their corporate office to see what they would say. For that 79.90/month they are offering a blazing 256Kbps! Knowing that, I guess I should be satisfied with my actual speed (which at an average 180Kbps is relatively close to what they claim to offer) and instead be annoyed solely with the financial rape of paying $80 a month for that kind of crappy service.