DSL provider recommendation

Wed Jul 23 19:11:12 PDT 2003

On Wednesday, July 23, 2003, at 04:49  PM, Chuck Yerkes wrote:

> Quoting Alberto Begliomini (aub at coldstone.com):
>> I am shopping around for a DSL provider!
>>
>> SBC has been way too unreliable in the past few months. My connection 
>> was
>> down for 2 weeks because they made an administrative mistake, and they
>> had to re-provision the line again! This morning our connection was 
>> down
>> for more than one hour, and SBC does not have any clue of what 
>> happened
>> (of course, they asked me which version of Windows I am running!)
>
> And that won't change with another IP provider on those wires.

Actually I'll argue against that.  Part of it does matter who the data 
comes from.  Sure, if the cable gets cut it's SBCs fault no matter who 
your ISP is.  But there are other things that can go wrong on the IP 
end.

I ran side by side SBC and XO Communications (Concentric) DSL lines in 
to my house for almost a year.  In that year I had one 2 hour outage 
from XO when one of their core routers went out in San Jose.  In that 
same time I didn't go a month without losing between an hour and a day 
of connectivity from SBC.

Both of the lines were pulled by SBC, but which one was more reliable?  
I dropped the SBC line for a second XO and my problems went away. Even 
after that it took SBC 3 months to stop charging me for the line, and 
two more months before they finally got all of the credits squared away.

-Sean