Which do you use?  Which do you like?  Some small businesses use DSL and some use a cable solution (like Comcast’s).

DSL is tricky – there are times that it is extremely good, and times when it’s not.  Placing a service onto 100 year old copper lines and expecting it to work flawlessly is a difficult thing.  Fios is Verizon’s answer to this – at least for many of the home users in its region.  See a cute Fios video here.  It’s my understanding that if you’re a business that happens to be in the way of Fios (between two neighborhoods) you can also take advantage of the new fiber infrastructure.  In the 14 state region of Qwest’s, you’re out of luck.  To my knowledge they never developed and marketed a product like Fios.  Hopefully with the Qwest / Centurylink merger, small business and home users in that 14 state territory will see some new product sets to fill this gap.  Running their service over a new fiber infrastructure when it makes sense will draw in more loyal business and consumer customers.

It’s my experience that Comcast is a great alternative – when you can get them.  Their infrastructure is relatively new compared with telephony alternatives so the possibility of downtime is minimal in most cases.   The fact that they continue pushing out greater and greater bandwidth alternatives to their existing base of consumer and business customers is amazing.   For small business customers you can now get 25 Norton Security licenses for free as part of your service.  Along with that they’ll throw in some productivity tools from Microsoft.  Check out promos here. 

So my advice to Comcast is to expand your footprint so that more small businesses can take advantage of your service!

My advice to Qwest/Centurylink is to expand your product offering for consumers and small business customers!  Push your fiber out to the home and industrial complexes more.

Sometimes it seems like there are way too many choices.  If you do your homework and talk with some of your neighbors or fellow business people you should be able to make the best choice for yourself.