Hi all - I'm new to the area.. living near the WPI campus. Is anyone here happy with their DSL service?
I've probably set the record for the number of high-bandwidth providers I've tried. I have two locations, a residence off Salisbury St and an office on Lancaster, several blocks from WPI. Started with Flashcom/Northpoint (2 DSL lines) - fairly reliable under they went bust. Service taken over by Telocity - also fairly reliable Then Northpoint went bust. Telocity offered me Verizon, so I passed. Put the house on Charter cable for a couple of weeks. I think about 6 service calls in the first week due to signal strength problems. They do not currently cover my office area, but may within next six months. Got about 600-700kbps downloads from them. They do have static IPs for an extra $10 a month, I think. Their tech support is outsourced. Put the house on Qwest Business Service SDSL as well as a third site (also near WPI). They bumble around a lot like any big organization. Lost service for a week in July due to a claimed router malfunction in Newark (took out most of Northeast for them) and the Code Red virus took all their end-user Cisco routers out for over a week before Cisco came up with a patch. They only guarantee 80% of the bandwidth you buy, and I don't ever seem to get more than that. They do get things fixed and they're big enough to be around a while. On the other hand I've got 5 static IPs from them at each location. Currently running fine. Put the office on Galaxy/Rhythms 768/384 line sharing. Complained about the speed, was only getting 620. They were genuinely concerned, tweaked the line, and left me with 1mbps. Reliability excellent. Unfortunately while on vacation 3 weeks ago I read in the Wall Street Journal that they were shutting down in 30 days (Rhythms Chapter 11). Have an order in for Speakeasy 384SDSL for the office, expect to go live with it on Sept 6th (3 weeks, a record). Speakeasy's online order status system is incredible. They use Covad. To set the record straight, Covad has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but claims it will not affect the operation of their DSL network. We'll see. I've never had a provider blame Verizon for anything. Only time they were to blame, some poor Verizon voice guy disconnected the line to my home DSL. I called Qwest and there was a Verizon guy there 9am the next morning (Saturday, pouring rain) to fix it. So I guess I'm on my ninth install now. There aren't a lot of good choices left. All I know is I won't put all my eggs in any one basket again. Dick -- ------------------------------------------------- Richard Goodman dick@goodman1.net ---> Home: (508) 753-DICK trader@goodman1.net ---> Work: (508) 757-3452 voice/fax