We’ve been Tinged!

And I think it’s a good thing.

(Sorry, another geeky post.)

Fiber Internet finally became an option for us this year; Verizon was never interested in Alexandria for some reason (I prefer to think the city was unwilling to give them too sweet of a deal).

My hope is: because they are not competing with themselves for cable TV viewers (as Comcast is), they will be more reliable and more transparent. I was surprised when we moved from Verizon (DSL Internet) to Comcast (cable Internet) several years ago that I had to change the way we get DNS resolution.

About 18 months later, during the Covid pandemic work from-home-days, I got a bit more insight into what seemed to be going on. And I was very unhappy about it. That experience broke any trust I may have had in Comcast and led me to start looking at options. One recommendation from the upshot of Comcast blocking access to VPNs (including those used by federal employees working from home) was to turn off the “Security Edge” service. In my case, that meant a new service bundle, higher priced, and (theoretically) less featureful. But DNS resolution still required forwarding our queries upstream, which only made me more unhappy. I am very happy to welcome Ting to the neighborhood and trust they will not interfere with our use of the Internet as Comcast did.

I’ve removed the forwarding clauses from our DNS configuration (mentioned in that earlier post) and not seeing any problems. Ting is not consistently 1 GB symmetrical — it is, however, consistently faster than any prior connection we’ve had and way more bandwidth than we could ever need (and less expensive than Comcast).