Any Greensboro, NC residents (or recent residents) 'round here?

[Ben E Lou]

Looking for recommendations (or companies to avoid) for cable/internet service in the NW G'boro area.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

Looking for recommendations (or companies to avoid) for cable/internet service in the NW G'boro area.

I used to live there. What companies are your options?

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

I used to live there. What companies are your options?

Still trying to sort through that. The one I wanted (Northstate) is not an option. Have yet to call any others.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

Still trying to sort through that. The one I wanted (Northstate) is not an option. Have yet to call any others.

Yeah, North State is High Point only and not all that good anyway. I think you're probably stuck with AT&T or Time Warner. What are you doing up in my old neck of the woods?

[Ben E Lou]

We are moving there for a job opportunity for my wife. She grew up there and her parents are still nearby, in High Point. I work remotely, so no job change needed for me. (And I'm curious about the North State comment. They get 40/10 with a ping value nearly always less than 10 on my wireless. If that's bad, then I can't wait to see what's good!)

[gstelmack]

You're going to be 75 minutes or so from me now. MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You're almost certainly stuck with AT&T or Time Warner. The big differentiators aren't really bandwidth and ping, they are service and reliability. I suspect that's what bites North State.

[gstelmack]

To add a bit more, AT&T can be trickier to get than TWC, they are more reliant on distance from the boxes they have for UVerse (you don't want DSL these days). Their website still doesn't think I can get it, although my neighbors can. They generally seem happy with AT&T, I'm generally happy with TWC (for Internet, I don't have nor care about TV or phone with either). You have the option of higher speeds with TWC, although AT&T is working towards gigabit up here (Winston-Salem, then Raleigh area), and Google wants in, which may change the equation.

Greensboro seems to do a fair amount of beta testing of new stuff for TWC, they got the 30 and 50 megabit plans first, for example, which may be worth considering.

[Subby]

You know for a fact that the Internet at Baytree Drive is EPIC.

DO IT! DO IT!

[Scarecrow]

Originally Posted by Subby

You know for a fact that the Internet at Baytree Drive is EPIC.

DO IT! DO IT!

Can we have a Renaissance Fair in your Theater Room????

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

We are moving there for a job opportunity for my wife. She grew up there and her parents are still nearby, in High Point. I work remotely, so no job change needed for me. (And I'm curious about the North State comment. They get 40/10 with a ping value nearly always less than 10 on my wireless. If that's bad, then I can't wait to see what's good!)

Well, live in High Point then. Getting to GSO is just a short drive down Wendover or 68.

Probably the most racially fucked-up city I've ever had the misfortune of living in. There are some decent sides to GSO, but daaaamn is it fucked up in that sense.

[Ben E Lou]

Zero chance of living in High Point. No reason to deal with traffic on Wendover (would have to be Wendover due to wife's job location) when housing in Greensboro is so absurdly affordable.

Racial issues in what way? My wife lived there for most of the time we were dating ('95-'97) and we never encountered any issues there...

[CU Tiger]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

Well, live in High Point then. Getting to GSO is just a short drive down Wendover or 68.

Probably the most racially fucked-up city I've ever had the misfortune of living in. There are some decent sides to GSO, but daaaamn is it fucked up in that sense.

First thought when I saw the thread title as well.
Of course "fucked-up" is kinda vague, but my experience was very separationist on both sides. Even more so than the the rest of the South.

I've never lived in Greensboro, but we worked there a good bit and it seemed that there was essentially no diversity. Every neighborhood, every grocery store, every gas station was clearly white or black. And you had class warfare amongst both races.

Basically a ton of redneck white trash, surrounding a town with a large HBU (at this point Winston and Greensboro might as well be one city) and even in the shrinking middle class it seemed very "separate but equal"

Blackadar may have a different perspective entirely, but my first thought was Oh boy....race wars FTW and then seeing his post made me laugh.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

Zero chance of living in High Point. No reason to deal with traffic on Wendover (would have to be Wendover due to wife's job location) when housing in Greensboro is so absurdly affordable.

Racial issues in what way? My wife lived there for most of the time we were dating ('95-'97) and we never encountered any issues there...

Actually, the new I-73 makes getting around the south-west side of GSO very easy. I used to live here in High Point:

Quarterstaff Ct - Google Maps

and could make it to Wendover/I-40 inside 15 minutes even before I-73. Housing is affordable everywhere in that area for sure.

As for the racial issues, I've never seen a more racially divided city. Even Boston, known for racial tension, didn't compare. I worked or lived in GSO from 1988 until 2002 and it was pretty bad. The infamous Klan march in '79 didn't help things. The constant battles over things like the Woolworth's museum and other civil rights landmarks was unbelievable - the African-American leaders wanted the city to pay huge dollars to make everything a massive monument to civil rights while the white leaders didn't want to fork over a dime for anything. There was no middle ground.

Plus the city itself was divided quite literally with the tracks downtown. East was almost all minority, with NC A&T. If you were white on that side of town after dark, you quite literally were taking your life in your hands. On the west side after dark (NC GSO, GSO College side), if you were a minority you ran a very high chance of having the police pick you up for driving while black. Never mind trying to get served at a restaurant or anything like that. The whole fucking area still seemed to be fighting the Civil War. The city was mentally divided into armed racial camps and there wasn't a middle ground. Maybe it's better now, but back in the late 80s and early 90s it was bad.

[britrock88]

Don't have much to add to what others have said, but I can chime in if/when you're curious about other things.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by britrock88

Don't have much to add to what others have said, but I can chime in if/when you're curious about other things.

So, you have no opinion on cable/internet there? As per my first post, that's the only useful info I was looking for here.

[digamma]

It does sound like the cable/internet decision is going to be key, since you won't be able to leave your house very often due to all of the race riots and other dangers in the cittay.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by digamma

It does sound like the cable/internet decision is going to be key, since you won't be able to leave your house very often due to all of the race riots and other dangers in the cittay.

True dat.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by digamma

It does sound like the cable/internet decision is going to be key, since you won't be able to leave your house very often due to all of the race riots and other dangers in the cittay.

Don't be a douchenozzle. It's gotten better, but remember this is the place this happened: Greensboro massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and that happened less than a decade before I moved there. The reverberations over having 5 people murdered in broad daylight and all-white juries voting for acquittal had serious long-term consequences. There were riots and there was a lot of general anger that was expressed in many ways, including a lot of interracial violence.

As for the cable, it's pretty much Time Warner in GSO.

[digamma]

Lighten up, dude. It was a joke.

#grewupinthesouthtoo

[Young Drachma]

Lolz

[yeah826]

I've lived in greensboro for a while actually just left the area very recently I never heard of any race riots?

[Subby]

The white internet in greensboro is amazing, from what I've heard.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by digamma

It does sound like the cable/internet decision is going to be key, since you won't be able to leave your house very often due to all of the race riots and other dangers in the cittay.

We got out of Charleston on Saturday much later than expected on Saturday due to the hired moving crew no-showing and having to get a backup crew. I sent the wife and daughters on to High Point to stay with the in-laws and I waited back in Charleston until the bitter end, drove as far as I could until I got sleepy, then crashed in a hotel somewhere between Columbia and Charlotte. Got up Sunday morning and drove to GSO where I stopped to grab breakfast at a McDonald's near our new home and awaited the wife to drive over from High Point, and we'd go to the house at the same time.

I was sitting at a table near the line tooling around on the internet when I noticed a little redhead boy out of the corner of my eye standing in line. He was around 3, hiding behind his father's legs and trying to play peek-a-boo with me. Of course I obliged, shared a few laughs and grins, and his dad (ZOMFG, A WHITE GUY IN GREENSBORO!!!!1) and I struck up a conversation. I told him we were literally just arriving in town.

That racist bastard--the first stranger either of us would meet here, minutes after arriving in town--introduced himself, shook my hand, and invited my family to come to church with his next week. This place is terrifying. Clearly "church" is a code word for "we're gonna have us a cross-burnin', boy!"


(Side note: a brief internet search revealed that he's an elder in one of the churches that was already on our radar as a possibility.)

[CU Tiger]

Originally Posted by Ben E Lou

We got out of Charleston on Saturday much later than expected on Saturday due to the hired moving crew no-showing and having to get a backup crew. I sent the wife and daughters on to High Point to stay with the in-laws and I waited back in Charleston until the bitter end, drove as far as I could until I got sleepy, then crashed in a hotel somewhere between Columbia and Charlotte. Got up Sunday morning and drove to GSO where I stopped to grab breakfast at a McDonald's near our new home and awaited the wife to drive over from High Point, and we'd go to the house at the same time.

I was sitting at a table near the line tooling around on the internet when I noticed a little redhead boy out of the corner of my eye standing in line. He was around 3, hiding behind his father's legs and trying to play peek-a-boo with me. Of course I obliged, shared a few laughs and grins, and his dad (ZOMFG, A WHITE GUY IN GREENSBORO!!!!1) and I struck up a conversation. I told him we were literally just arriving in town.

That racist bastard--the first stranger either of us would meet here, minutes after arriving in town--introduced himself, shook my hand, and invited my family to come to church with his next week. This place is terrifying. Clearly "church" is a code word for "we're gonna have us a cross-burnin', boy!"


(Side note: a brief internet search revealed that he's an elder in one of the churches that was already on our radar as a possibility.)

Glad you had a positive experience!

[Butter]

But make sure to let us know which church so we know where to send the cops when you don't show back up here within the next month.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

To add a bit more, AT&T can be trickier to get than TWC, they are more reliant on distance from the boxes they have for UVerse (you don't want DSL these days).

We ended up going with Uverse. We made contact with a few folks in the NW GSO area and they were universal in saying that TWC had numerous outages and poor customer service here. I recently learned that we're getting the new GigaPower service in our neighborhood in 2015. Pretty happy about that.

Future Plans & Current Locations for U-verse with AT&T GigaPower

[Ben E Lou]

Ha. I hadn't noticed the list of cities. One of these things is not like the others...

21 new major metros, for our new wave of expansion. Those include: Atlanta, Augusta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Oakland, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis, San Francisco, and San Jose.

[Ben E Lou]

OK, so 2. (Didn't notice Augusta)

[Desnudo]

Originally Posted by Subby

The white internet in greensboro is amazing, from what I've heard.

That would be a truly hilarious business [assuming it didn't actually work out].