-----Original Message-----
From: "Eric L. Strobel" <fyzycyst_at_home.com>
> From what I've heard in the DC area, there's been a huge surge in
> folks
> signing up for DSL service. This was on Friday night I heard this.
> The
> point was being made that even if you were trying to bail out to
> alternate
> service, it could be weeks before the backlog was worked through.
DSL (at least Qwest DSL) takes at least two weeks to get set up,
regardless. And if a mistake is made by you OR THEM, they start over
and it takes two weeks from that point to get going.
I've played that game with the. That's why I switched to @Home
(through Mediacom in Des Moines, IA). They had me up and running in
TWO DAYS. Also, I can rent OR buy the cable modem. Qwest made be buy
it. And then was going to make be buy a NEW one when I moved to my ne
house two years or less after buying the first one! With @Home, if you
buy the modem, your rental fee is removed. If you rent, you're
protected in case they DO have to change the modem (although they use a
variety of different modems; mine is different from the other ones i've
seen, from a different vendor.)
Stay away from Qwest DSL if you can.
>
> To be honest, around here, Earthlink DSL is only $10/mo. more than
> Comcast_at_Home (less when you account for the cable modem rental).
> Since it
> is almost impossible to achieve the theoretical speed of cable, I
> have to
> wonder if DSL isn't *effectively* as fast.
My old Qwest DSL and my newer Mediacom @Home connections are
effectively the same speed; 30-60K/sec on average, with bursts on good
sites such as those with Quicktime movies that are up to 200K.
Hard to get an truly accurate measure of what's possible. Too many
variables.
(I've rarely seen
> connections
> faster than 100K/sec and essentially never seen 200K/sec, especially
> since
> Code Red/Nimda, because there continues to be a background of traffic
> that
> has never ended from the time these critters started out.)
That's the only downside of @Home so far; because of CodeRed/Nimda
they've turned of the Web port (80) and so I can't run the Info-Newt
server any more (well, not without having to use something like
www.info-newt.com:8080 instead, which sort of defeats the purpose of
having a nice domain name....
My local @Home service did go down all day Saturday (sometime after
2am), but that was apparently due to a mistake at ExciteAtHome where
they cut off service accidentally (rather than on purpose) to
MediaCom. It came back up by 10:30pm Saturday night. Nothing changed
on my end, not even the IP address I had been assigned by DHCP (as I
had switched over to using it as a static address anyway, but had
switched back to DHCP after the service went down just in case the
process of bringing it back up needed to assign me a new ip).
Mediacom does have SOME relationship to AT&T but it's not clear to me
what it is (our cable service and @Home used to be AT&T until a few
months ago; I think Mediacom bought out AT&T in Iowa and Illinois, but
there perhaps is/was still some transitioning going on....)
> > And getting downloads as high as 300k per second is a wonderful
> thing.
> >
>
> Would if that were true!!! I find that there's still probably a good
> 90-95%
> of the sites I visit that simply can't support that kind of
> throughput on
> *their* end, whether due to too many users or too little bandwidth to
> start
> with.
>
Me too. DSL or Cable.
- Bill
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Jan 02 2002 - 12:01:02 EST