Re: [PLUG] DirecTV DSL & Linux

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 08:45 AM, Edward M. Corrado wrote:
> > and DCANet are,
>
> I haven't looked in DCANet before. I just went to their website, and 
> from
> what I read they seem pretty good. They claim not to block any ports or
> services, don't use PPPoE, and will provide 6 useable IP addresses
> (I assume one is from the DSL device, and I can connect 5 other
> devices). They do provide the ADSL (Residential) service through 
> Verizon,
> so I might be able to get it. I filled out the online form and got a
> message saying that the online availability verification is currently 
> down
> (not very good PR, IMO), but they said someone will contact me. One 
> thing
> that I don't really like that I saw, however, is that I need to use
> Verizon for my local telephone services (which while I currently do
> since up until a short while ago we didn't have a choice in New Jersey
> until recently and I've been to lazy to do anything about it), I don't
> like to have myself locked in

DCA resells Verizon DSL in most areas since COVAD went belly-up. (This 
is also true of virtually all other DSL in the area, there are a few 
pockets of COVAD and RCN service, but neither is expanding.) But this 
is not a big deal as Verizon DSL is a tariffed service of Verizon the 
RBOC, which is not the same company as Verizon the ISP. (Yeah, they are 
at the parent level, but not at the "grunt" level.)

You get a /29 address, but must register the MAC addresses with them. 
(You get 6 addresses, the modem does not need one, it's a modem, not an 
IP device.)

With DCA you are a "true peer" on the Internet.
You get a DSL MODEM (not a "cable router") and you can plug whatever 
you want into that modem -- normally one would plug in an Ethernet HUB 
or maybe a thing like a LinkSys Cable/DSL 4/8 port router... etc.

I've been using DCAnet with BellAtlantic (now Verizon) DSL since it 
first became available in Phila some ?5?6? Years ago. After their 
initial learning curve, problems have been no worse than I've had with 
any Backbone ISP (Worldcom, uunet, Sprint, etc.) over the years. It 
works more than it doesn't work. And while occasionally there are CO 
problems, they are not frequent enough nor long lasting enough to 
warrant my calling anybody. I've had one outage that lasted more than a 
couple of minutes in the past 2 years.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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