ChaserCentral

I have been a Mediacom customer for several years now. When living in Eureka, and Roanoke Illinois, and most recently in Atlantic, Iowa. This is a short overview and review of my experiences with them.

Eureka, IL (2003?-2011)

While living with my parents in Eureka, IL we had Bitwise dialup and MTCO dialup service before switching to Mediacom. While living here Mediacom was just starting to come out, and speeds were roughly 12/1 when I moved to Roanoke. I do not remember having that many issues with Mediacom in Eureka, besides the occasional outage.

Grade for Mediacom Service in Eureka, IL: B 

Roanoke, IL (2011-2012)

While in living in Roanoke, IL approximately 1.5 Years I was on the 20/2 Package as this was the most bandwidth available at the time.

Here is a look at at speed test results over the month of April 2012

As you can see, I was not getting what I paid for all of the time. To add to this the Roanoke, area was over saturated running at 90+% utilization. This means that during peak hours there would be issues with speeds and congestion.

Grade for Mediacom Service in Roanoke, IL: D+

Atlantic, IA (2012-)

When moving to a new location one very important thing is internet availability and speed. When moving to Atlantic, Ia This was one of the first things I looked into. I saw that Mediacom was available and this gave me mixed feelings. After seeing that I could get 50/5 service for roughly the same price as my 20/2 service I jumped on it. I went to the local Mediacom store and signed up. They were able to get a technician out the very next day to do the install. (This scores major points in my book)

While on the 50/5 Mediacom Ultra Package.

The difference from Roanoke, IL to Atlantic, IA for Mediacom service was night and day. Atlantic market seems to be overbuilt and not overly saturated. I was easily able to pull 53+Mbps down and 5Mbps up. There have been roughly a handful of occasions where service was sluggish but I have not had any prolonged outages or anything that made service unusable.

Grade for Mediacom Ultra Service in Atlantic, IA: A-

Since Mediacom Ultra service was working so well I decided to upgrade to 105/10 Ultra Plus service. So far this service is the best Mediacom experience to date. This service is snappy, responsive and fast. I am able to pull up to 13+MBps download speeds on some items. Overall speedtest results are skewed via speedtest.net as servers are not fast enough so I have posted results via Comcast speedtest server.

Grade for Mediacom Ultra Plus Service in Atlantic, IA: A

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at The Summits Edge with my company. Since there website does not have any reviews and is kind of poorly laid out I wanted to post a review to help them out. First off When we got there we were warmly welcomed by Bill Ingold and shown to the gym so that we could get our harnesses on. After a quick briefing on safety we were taken upstairs for a brief but thorough explanation of safety procedure on the high rope course. Everybody had a very enjoyable and safe time on the high rope course and was challenged to the point they were comfortable. After completing the high ropes courses anybody who was not exhausted and wanted to was given the opportunity to try there luck at the climbing walls. We were given a short briefing on safety procedure and allowed to begin. The walls were sufficiently challenging after the strenuous high ropes course. If you have rock climbing shoes I would suggest bringing them as it will make the climb a lot easier on you. Once we had run out of time it was time for lunch  which was from the attached red rock bar /grill the pizza was delicious and I would go back here to eat in the future. So if you are looking for something fun to do with you company or other group in the Central Illinois area I would definitely suggest you check out the Summits Edge in Morton.

I have had the pleasure to play with my Motorola Xoom for a few weeks now. As a storm chaser and a tech enthusiast I am always looking for storm chasing technology. I believe that the Motorola Xoom could replace your aging laptop for storm chasing. I used my Xoom for 20hrs on a single charge as a wifi hotspot this would eliminate the need for a data card if you insist on using your laptop. There are several great weather radar apps for android. Including Storm Chaser Weather Radar and Pykl3 Radar. Currently there are not really any good tools for android for forecasting however Weather Geek Pro and the F5 App. Promise to change this in the coming weeks. I plan to chase at least once using nothing but my Motorola Droid Phone and my Motorola Xoom Tablet. I will let everybody know how that turns out so stay tuned.

Below is a quick look at a alpha version of Pykl3 Running on a Motorola Xoom.

If you have any questions or comments shoot me a @reply on twitter @chasercentral
And don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube page