| William H. Magill on Tue, 13 May 2003 12:50:28 -0400 |
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On Monday, May 12, 2003, at 05:06 PM, Pete Foley wrote: So I have been a long time Speakeasy fan and advocate (almost 4 years), but I am considering switching. Mainly because I want a faster uplink (right now I have the 608down/128up) that will not send me to the poor house. You'd think that these companies would market to their existing customer base... I've been a Cavalier dial-tone customer since they were DelMarva (or who ever it was, I forget) back in 1999. My only complaint is that I can't use almost all touch-tone voice response systems from my phone. (I know why, but I can't get them to fix it, because the problem has to do with the part of the phone line that they rent from Verizon.) [Just to keep folks straight, my DCAnet DSL connection is on a separate Verizon only line.... don't ask.] I am looking at the 768/768 package. Overall (dsl+local+ld service) it will save me 35$ a month and it looks like pretty fast service. I was wondering if anyone has used their DSL. I looked on DSL reports, and there was only one report from the philly area, and it was good. Cavalier was not offering DSL in Pennsylvania last summer, so it's not surprising. I suspect that today, DSL service is a pretty well established technology, virtually a commodity. That's a big change from just 2-3 years ago. The actual DSL link will run at rated speed, and probably have minimal problems. The question is/will be - how much pipe do they have from the COs to their back-bone, and then out to the Internet. Cavalier now claims to have their own fibre between the COs they service, so bandwidth might prove to be an issue as their customer base increases. Now I think I have become spoiled by Speakeasy, but they are really expensive. Cavalier offers the same stuff, static IP, multiple email addresses, etc. The only thing missing is a free dial-up for when one is on the road.
As for the free dial-up on the road (where free = 800 number) ... Nobody seems to offer that any more. If you have it you have it, but new customers aren't being offered it... unless you pay for it by paying a higher price like with Speakeasy. 800 service isn't cheap to provide. Especially if you are going to provide "enough" so that people don't complain about the AOL problem -- busy signals. Besides, more and more business oriented hotels now offer in-room DSL service, typically for $9 a day. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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