Re: OT: DSL Providers

[Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com>]

allen wayne best just ramblin in his amx wrote:

> this is slightly off topic, but here goes.
> 
> i got a notice from my dsl provider (verio/best) yesterday that they were 
> selling my account to earthlink (aaaaaaaaacccccccccccccckkkkkkkkk!) and that 
> they would no longer provide service beyond 31 oct. so it is time for me to 
> find a dsl provider other than "where *WE* want you to go" aol, pacific 
> "don't bother us" bell, or "our brain is on another planet" earthlink. 
> 
> has any one have any experience with a dsl provider in the san francisco 
> (south bay) area that doesn't immediately go catatonic if the os is not from 
> the great Satan of the northwest?????

I have PacBell DSL and I'm quite happy with it. They don't care what's
on my end of the connection. They provide software and installation
support only for Windows (maybe Mac?), but that doesn't matter to me as
I don't need their help for anything on my side of the DSL modem. The
DSL itself has been generally quite reliable, and PacBell didn't do
anything stupid in response to Code Red, such as blocking all inbound
port 80 traffic.

The only downside is that they insist on using PPPOE, so you don't get a
static IP address (at least not for a cheap single-IP-address home-user
account). So I use dyndns.org, and I have the ipcheck Python script in
a cron job to make sure dyndns always knows what my address is.

Also, it took them MONTHS to get around to installing after I placed my
order, but apparently that was because they needed to do some copper
upgrading in my neighborhood. Once that was taken care of, the install
happened within a few weeks.

You do the installation yourself -- they send you a box with the DSL
modem, a bunch of line filters for your regular telephones, and a CD
with Windows (and Mac?) software that you don't really need anyway. All
their tech has to do is adjust the filtering on your phone line to let
the DSL signal through.

Although they give you only a single address (dynamic, at that), they
don't seem to care if that address is actually owned by a router. I've
told them I was doing that, and their response was, "Oh, that's cool."
In fact, I recently got a promotional thing in the mail from them where
they were offering to sell me a router, so I would guess it is now
official policy that that's okay.

The other thing I like about using PacBell is there's no middleman. I've
heard many times from other people that their DSL provider claimed that
the problems they were experiencing were the fault of PacBell or whatever
regional telco owned the physical wiring, and the telco insisted the
problem was on the DSL provider's end. With PacBell, the telco IS the
DSL provider (or at least they're all part of the same conglomerate --
I think PacBell Internet is a distinct organization from Pacific Bell),
so that sort of thing doesn't seem to happen.

Craig