 Review by g0nepostal 
UPDATED: 71 days ago
member for 8.6 years, 2035 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Concord,Contra Costa,CA
 $35 per month (12 month contract)
 about 7 days
 "Reliable service, very few outages"
 "Services servers slow, usage is now capped/throttled"
 "Stay away unless you like capped/throttled service"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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Final update: Now that Astound is part of Wave Broadband their service is now being capped/throttled. The last straw came when, despite having a local caching DNS as well as a proxy server on my home network (to help reduce network traffic), my HSI service kept getting throttled to less than 512Kbps downstream - on a 6 Mbps downstream account.
I have now signed up with DSL Extreme and have an activation date of 09/01/2009, so as soon as DSL service is live I am going to Astound's customer service center in Walnut Creek to hand in the cable modem and drop my HSI service from my Astound account.
See you later Astound, and good riddance.
(Original review is below)
I have had Astound Broadband for about four years now after ditching Comcast (Comcast had just taken over ATT Broadband). Thankfully, Concord has the option of either Comcast or Astound for its cable service, so I went with Astound.
Despite some growing pains Astound Broadband has been a pretty good (4/5 stars) ISP. It's connection reliability is excellent: I have had a total of 4 outages - each lasting less than an hour - in two years. Its routing is also not bad at all; we reach most any server in the continental United States in less than 50ms. Since my brother and I do a fair amount of gaming this is important.
NOTE: There are now reports here on BBR that Wave Broadband - Astound's parent company - is now capping its users. I too have noticed (but have not scientifically confirmed) that Astound does now appear to be using traffic shaping, as its speeds during long downloads have been all over the map. I have also noticed several times that the Netflix streamed movies I watch have had the stream speeds slowed down. If Astound is now indeed now capping its service then I will find another, uncapped alternative. Because of this I am downgrading Astound a notch.
When I first signed up for Astound I signed up for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 Kbps service at $40 a month, bundled with cable TV. Astound now has five different service tiers, with a 6 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up tier for $35 a month when bundled. This is the tier I am on now, and having 1 Mbps for upstream is awesome. I generally get about 92% of the rated speeds whenever I run speed tests, so I am getting what I pay for. Astound recently raised its rates for cable television service, but kept its HSI rates intact.
Growing pains for Astound are evident in its DNS servers, which have a nasty habit of going down or being extremely unresponsive. Because of this I previously used third-party DNS servers from Cisco and Level 3 for my DNS lookups and avoided Astound's DNS servers altogether. Also lacking is Astound's e-mail, which while good at blocking spam has a rather spartan (and confusing) webmail interface.
(Update: I have gone back to using third-party DNS servers from Cisco and Level 3; for a while I had been using Astound's but they're too unreliable and slow to use for my network. Eventually I plan to use my own caching-only DNS server, with the third-party servers as forwarding DNS servers.)
I've only used tech support a few times, mostly to report outages and slow DNS servers. However, each time I called I spoke to reps who appeared to be using scripts rather than being competent tech support staff. Since this seems to be a standard industry practice I won't downgrade Astound for this but will mark its tech support as average.
Overall, I'd rate Astound a 3/5 (used to be 4/5 but since it is now capped with traffic shaping as far I am concerned Astound HSI is no better than Comcast). It's not a bad ISP; connection reliability is excellent and the prices are not bad at all. Despite its shortcomings, if you don't mind doing a little work on your own and appreciate reliability Astound is an above average ISP.
EDIT: The monthly rate for 6 Mbps down / 1Mbps up is $25 when bundled with cable TV, and I recently had a short outage. However, given Astound's connection reliability, $25 a month is not bad at all. 
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