Moving into our house this weekend, and trying to get all lined up w/ utilities and internet.  Is Charter the only internet provider for Billings?

We have charter and it works fine.

thanks guys--saw that Centurylink was only 6mbps?!?!  Might as well go back to using smoke signals.

Went with Charter instead.

We stream a ton on Apple TV with no real issues. You'll be fine with it.

How much of a difference does it really make once you get past their gateway and into mainstream traffic, though? I'm on 20m service, but rarely see anything that actually even reaches 1mbps

Typically there are several places that your speed can bottleneck. Think of tree limbs (and you are at the end), and the trunk is the internet. Depends on how much has been invested in infrastructure at your ISP, how many people are on your "limb", and what possible high utilization they may be attempting.  For instance, you may get decent speeds during the day, or early morning when most people are at work (and now kids are at school).  Come 6pm to 11pm or so, you will most likely get much lower speeds since all your other "neighbors" are gaming and watching stuff on NetFlix.



Overall, it has a lot to do with your ISP and how their infrastructure is.

In other words you can be on the widest, fastest race track in the world but if you ride is a turtle what differences does if make. Actually, the biggest limiting factor in most cases are the servers that one gets there downloads from. They intentionally limit the amount of data that one can download from them so as to spread it around to other users.

Fast speeds in towns reported but were in the stix.
Montana ranks 50th in data service and country folk are living proof. Tried to get a commercial connection but no go.