DSL provider recommendation

Fri Jul 25 15:05:03 PDT 2003

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 02:49:50PM -0700, Alberto Begliomini wrote:
> I am shopping around for a DSL provider!
> 
> SBC has been way to 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!)
> 
> Any recommendation for a dencently reliable DSL provider that has a 
> support team that has at least half clue of what they are doing?
> 
> Thanks in advance, I'll summarize the answers.
> 
> Alberto

I can't say anything except hearsay (which others have much better
experience of) for Speakeasy but I don't recall it being seriously
flamed.

Meer.Net is of course BayLISA's present website host.  Maybe you could
see if they want to offer a deal for BayLISA members :D

My own ISP, Idiom.Com, has contracts which a few different DSL
providers.  Only one of them is particularly suited to my area, but you
are a considerable distance up the peninsula, thus you may find yourself
with the pleasure of some choices.

When it comes to the backhoe fandango though, it all comes down to who
or what owns the wires near you.

Idiom's support crew is small but absolutely everyone there is clued.
Not only do they generally know what's going on but they aren't afraid
to say whatever it is.  The only soft spot is that the little "status
recording" is the last thing to get updated.   Though this may be a
symptom of me being a sufficiently active user of my broadband, that I'm
early to notice when it glitches out, too.  They can be paged for
outages in the middle of the night;  never heard of SBC managing to do
that.

They're a BSD house.  Linux using customers are just fine too.  Mac and
Windows users have helpful notes on his website (sufficiently helpful,
that I've used them to help non-Idiom people in other areas of the
country figure out what's with their screen.  No bs.)   His business is
optimized for keeping your bits flowing, not hand-holding complete
dummies, though.  I presume that is a feature among most of the folks on
this list... 

If you decide for Idiom among your several choices, tell Dave Chernoff 
Jim'n'Heather sent you; we'll get a small credit on our account.  And
say hi to Vonnie.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - consulting at starshine.org
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