Home Internet, what to choose? As a small business owner and an IT consultant, I have went back and forth with Spectrum Business and residential. With all said and done, I have landed with residential service once again. I have found no difference in support or uptime, only cost and speed. I’ve more than doubled my speed with residential for less per month. I went with the basic modem and added my own firewall for my inhouse network. I didn’t add the Wi-Fi service as I already have a good wireless network setup with 4 NetGear access points. With this setup, I have full control of what comes in and what goes out. I am using OpenDNS for basic filtering and dynamic DNS for VPN access to my home network when away. For those who have Spectrum residential with the Wi-Fi router, which can be swapped out for your own router if desired, you can make modifications to DNS settings to allow for filtering services such as OpenDNS. Business class service does not allow this. So far, I have been using residential service for 2 months now and have had no outages or slowdowns. My VPN connections to client networks have been stable.
If you have a home business, I would definitely recommend residential service over business class, at least in the case of Spectrum. Setup is painless and Spectrum will send someone out if needed. Since I moved from business to residential, there was some work needed in the box to bring in the correct service. Cancelling service was easy and returning equipment can be done at any Spectrum or UPS store.
