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I just got RR and am very happy with it
BTW, if you want to check your Bandwidth, I find a nifty tester here- http://www.2wire.com/bandwidth/bmresult.asp?kbps=0 .0

Another: http://www.dslreports.com/stest

I got 1.3Mb/s from my cable modem. Woohoo!

Chris

Hey. Check out dslreports.com as it's a place to post rants and rate ISPS (Not just dsl) , here is the @Home Page

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Hey. Check out dslreports.com as it's a place to post rants and rate ISPS (Not just dsl) , here is the @Home Page

-- .sig --

Know what you want. Are you connecting a network or just one system? (Some providers will actually charge you based on how many systems will use the line.) Are you hosting servers? (Some providers have restrictions on what you can host, and for this you'll want SDSL, and a static IP connection.)

Do your research on available providers. DSLReports is an invaluable resource for getting information on your area, and The List isn't bad, either. You'll also want to check out whatis.com's page on DSL . Find out what is their bandwidth oversubscription ratio. (ISPs make money by selling more bandwidth beneath them than they have coming in above them; otherwise the DS3 that feeds a network, $6k-$9k, would cost at least $133 per megabit before anything else was paid for. Typically the ratio is between 7.5:1 and 20:1.) If you're going to be spending big bucks for the connection, get references from the prospective companies.

Realize that a necessary part of the equation is the ILEC.(?) When nearly everyone gets DSL, a new copper local loop(?) must be installed, and that means the phone company in all their ignorance, circular logic, and incompetence must be involved. Realize up front that the loop installation will probably not go smoothly, and you'll save yourself some aggravation later on. Most people would agree that getting DSL installed ranges from a little annoying to a major nightmare, but that once it's installed, they're happy as clams; most of the installation problems are because of the ILEC.

When things don't work, kick ass and take names. When you talk to someone in the NOC or in customer service, don't accept half-assed or blow-off explanations. Make an issue when something you're told doesn't make sense. Make sure that they know you're taking notes and that you've written down their name. Don't take any crap. (One of our customers was recently told that their circuit was down because of bad weather in her area. "But there's a clear blue sky outside." No, the tech assured her, there was bad weather in her area and her line would be back up soon after the storm passed.)

Here's my report on my DSL. I recently got 1040Kbits/sec up/down SDSL from MegaPath in Palo Alto (SF Bay Area). Overall, I'm getting happy with them, but I'm still in the installation hell phase. Once the basic wiring problem gets sorted out, I can see that things will be very good, because the company is responsive and committed, and the hardware and network seem basically sound. Still, the installation problems are trying and frustrating and I am trying to get through it whole.

• Wires:
  The Pac Bell wire from my house to the phone company is about 9000 feet, and runs Frame Relay to NorthPoint. There's been a problem from day 1 with the line going up and down, but given that it took Pac Bell only 3 weeks to hook it up and it's only been up 1 month, I'm still well within the range of startup time problems that people have, and am expecting smooth sailing once the MegaPath/NorthPoint/PacBell menage a trois is done. Knock on wood!

• Installation:
  A disadvantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that there are three companies involved and they all have to coordinate. An advantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that because of the competitive/cooperative relationship, NorthPoint has much more clout with Pac Bell than I do, and MegaPath has clout with NorthPoint, and MegaPath is very responsive by e-mail and phone, so I don't have to spend hours on hold or wade through levels of official sympathizers before I get to talk to someone who can understand my problem. Every person I talked to was well informed, well versed in networking, and very polite. Conversely, I think they expect some level of technical sophistication in their users, but I haven't tested this hypothesis.

• Service:
  As I said, the support and tech people are all very smart and pleasant. They never talked down to me, and they were able to diagnose problems I'd caused myself. They are persistent in trying to get my installation problem straightened out and I am confident that the process will work. I often here of people with DSL installation problems who despair or give up because it appears that the process will not converge. I don't get that feeling, but I do see that it's going to take some time, because all three companies have process that they follow, and when you have a 2-sigma or 3-sigmal problem, there are a lot of steps to go through (replacing house wiring, monitoring etc., etc., etc.)

• Connection:
  MegaPath sells you a DSL WAN/Router/hub, and the only traffic you see on your wire is traffic to or from your house. With many other DSL and cable services, you get a "Modem/Bridge" device, wherein you see other people's traffic (and vice versa). The size of this "local" netwok varies with the provider, but I read on dslreports.com about a Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) customer who saw a broadcast storm every 15 minutes. He was able to see the ethernet address (shows you right there that it's really a shared ethernet!) and found it was an iMac. The tech support folks turned a deaf ear and told him not to use a network sniffer (reportedly). Another guy on dslreports read this, did the same, and saw that he could see it as well, and they were 30 miles apart! Again, I'm just quoting: here's the link. This kind of issue was a major reason for my going with MegaPath, since they don't have a large bridged network.

• Security:
  Not having other home users see your traffic and vice versa is a big deal in security, and if your provider uses a router instead of a bridge, then this happens. The router I got from MegaPath (a Netopia 7100R) has a firewall built in, and it comes with a NetBIOS blocker and a no-incoming-connections-at-all blocker, and you get to pick which one you want, or customize it (which I have done).

• Performance: Throughput and Latency
  

  • Throughput
    DSL Reports has test tools, and my 1040/1040 connection shows up at about 940/920, if memory serves me correctly. Given the TCP/IP and Frame Relay overhead, this seems fine. Other providers who offer "nominal" 1.5Mb/384Kb often lag behind by a greater margin, especially on the uplink. I've seen in particular that cable modems often offer in regular modem ranges for uplink. (As a side note, I found this way the USB ethernet adapter on my I-Opener only gets 20Kb/sec up!)

  • Latency
    Most of the time I get <8ms from my house to www.yahoo.com, and less than 6ms from my house to www.megapath.net. Through VPN hardware and into my company at work is about 25ms, most of which is going from one backbone to another on the Internet. Occasionally, however, something in the local San Jose abovenet backbone screws up and I get terrible throughput, at night, for an hour or two, and then it mysteriously repairs itself. MegaPath is aware of this problem and is working with their backbone provider to get it rectified. It's not a usage problem -- it goes from fine to wretched in 10 seconds, and back again (after an hour or two) in another 10 seconds. Again, I'm confident that this is a transient problem I'm seeing and that it's not due to chronic oversubscription or poor network management.

Here's my report on my DSL. I recently got 1040Kbits/sec up/down SDSL from MegaPath in Palo Alto (SF Bay Area). Overall, I'm getting happy with them, but I'm still in the installation hell phase. Once the basic wiring problem gets sorted out, I can see that things will be very good, because the company is responsive and committed, and the hardware and network seem basically sound. Still, the installation problems are trying and frustrating and I am trying to get through it whole.

• Wires:
  The Pac Bell wire from my house to the phone company is about 9000 feet, and runs Frame Relay to NorthPoint. There's been a problem from day 1 with the line going up and down, but given that it took Pac Bell only 3 weeks to hook it up and it's only been up 1 month, I'm still well within the range of startup time problems that people have, and am expecting smooth sailing once the MegaPath/NorthPoint/PacBell menage a trois is done. Knock on wood!

• Installation:
  A disadvantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that there are three companies involved and they all have to coordinate. An advantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that because of the competitive/cooperative relationship, NorthPoint has much more clout with Pac Bell than I do, and MegaPath has clout with NorthPoint, and MegaPath is very responsive by e-mail and phone, so I don't have to spend hours on hold or wade through levels of official sympathizers before I get to talk to someone who can understand my problem. Every person I talked to was well informed, well versed in networking, and very polite. Conversely, I think they expect some level of technical sophistication in their users, but I haven't tested this hypothesis.

• Service:
  As I said, the support and tech people are all very smart and pleasant. They never talked down to me, and they were able to diagnose problems I'd caused myself. They are persistent in trying to get my installation problem straightened out and I am confident that the process will work. I often here of people with DSL installation problems who despair or give up because it appears that the process will not converge. I don't get that feeling, but I do see that it's going to take some time, because all three companies have process that they follow, and when you have a 2-sigma or 3-sigmal problem, there are a lot of steps to go through (replacing house wiring, monitoring etc., etc., etc.)

• Connection:
  MegaPath sells you a DSL WAN/Router/hub, and the only traffic you see on your wire is traffic to or from your house. With many other DSL and cable services, you get a "Modem/Bridge" device, wherein you see other people's traffic (and vice versa). The size of this "local" netwok varies with the provider, but I read on dslreports.com about a Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) customer who saw a broadcast storm every 15 minutes. He was able to see the ethernet address (shows you right there that it's really a shared ethernet!) and found it was an iMac. The tech support folks turned a deaf ear and told him not to use a network sniffer (reportedly). Another guy on dslreports read this, did the same, and saw that he could see it as well, and they were 30 miles apart! Again, I'm just quoting: here's the link. This kind of issue was a major reason for my going with MegaPath, since they don't have a large bridged network.

• Security:
  Not having other home users see your traffic and vice versa is a big deal in security, and if your provider uses a router instead of a bridge, then this happens. The router I got from MegaPath (a Netopia 7100R) has a firewall built in, and it comes with a NetBIOS blocker and a no-incoming-connections-at-all blocker, and you get to pick which one you want, or customize it (which I have done).

• Performance: Throughput and Latency
  

  • Throughput
    DSL Reports has test tools, and my 1040/1040 connection shows up at about 940/920, if memory serves me correctly. Given the TCP/IP and Frame Relay overhead, this seems fine. Other providers who offer "nominal" 1.5Mb/384Kb often lag behind by a greater margin, especially on the uplink. I've seen in particular that cable modems often offer in regular modem ranges for uplink. (As a side note, I found this way the USB ethernet adapter on my I-Opener only gets 20Kb/sec up!)

  • Latency
    Most of the time I get <8ms from my house to www.yahoo.com, and less than 6ms from my house to www.megapath.net. Through VPN hardware and into my company at work is about 25ms, most of which is going from one backbone to another on the Internet. Occasionally, however, something in the local San Jose abovenet backbone screws up and I get terrible throughput, at night, for an hour or two, and then it mysteriously repairs itself. MegaPath is aware of this problem and is working with their backbone provider to get it rectified. It's not a usage problem -- it goes from fine to wretched in 10 seconds, and back again (after an hour or two) in another 10 seconds. Again, I'm confident that this is a transient problem I'm seeing and that it's not due to chronic oversubscription or poor network management.

For consumers, by consumers who tell the good, the bad and the ugly about their experiences with broadband. http://www.dslreports.com/

Separately, I've had good results with Speakeasy.net as a provider. Their website for subscribers lets you track the progress through the red tape and lets you see the actual logs that Covad maintains on the progress of the install.

XDG

Check out DSL report at http://www.dslreports.com. A very, very useful site that covers a lot of the issues raised by this story from lots of different angles.

It's alarming that most of the people who have any opinion about DSL, have a negative one (see DSL Reports for one), and the positive opinions look suspiciously like stroturfers.

I use my DSL line continuously for telecommuting (the only problem with being able to work from home is working when I'm home....) and an outage means I travel the Southern Californian highways for 26 miles to the office--something I hate. Only once since March have I gone into the office because of connection problems from home.

The other time I had a service burp I used my Earthlink dial-in option (20 hours/month at no extra charge for DSL customers; that's not fantastic, but I hardly use one tenth of that it turns out).

Yes, Earthlink via GTE/Verizon is PPPoE, but Roaring Penguin's PPPoE client for Linux works fantastic (and better than WinPoET on Windows, for sure) for my desktop use. No complaints, although I would prefer a true DSL IP connection.

Look, my DSL service is so good I don't even think about it. Sorry that I can't add to the list of whiners, but I'm a genuinely satisfied customer of Earthlink/GTE DSL service. Go figure.

Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers

Ooo, technology is moving quickly. Signing a contract means you're committed to something. "I can't weasel out of my financial committments.". Wah, wah!

Actually, signing a contract means you get tied to a company that only offers one thing with your service: "We guarantee we will take your money for a year (oh, and we'll probably laugh at you a lot, you moron)."

To illustrate.

--

FTTC and FTTH is going to be niche, broadband wireless, cable and DSL will be the vehicles that will carry people off modems.
Having FTTC only means great speed to your telco CO, where things return rapidly to internet speeds (39.95 a month does not pay for your own OC12 to the actual internet, even if the line from your garden to the CO is capable of that): Users of Verizon 7mbit ADSL lines report that they can rarely download at more than a megabit or so.. what a surprise, about what cable modem customers are doing.
See fastest providers chart on my website for some interesting stats on who has the bandwidth.

Most servers do not deliver more than 100k/sec to any one user anyway, even the more famous ones, the internet average is probably more like 50k/sec.

The stuff that will make use of any national high speed to the home (and FTTH/FTTC is far far from national) is going to get pushed to the edge of the network, it isnt economical to have it any other way.. when Blockbuster starts offering movies for rent that can be downloaded into your TIVO, or whatever, they are not going to build a huge plant in exodus somewhere and let the whole of the US fight a path to it, they'll have to make deals with providers to store the content close to the consumer.
Finally, better subscriber management systems will implement quality of service and traffic shaping, and this will simply limit or charge those that want to really suck down (or upload) immense amounts of data. Your office VPN will get priority over someone elses game demo downloads, and if the Bad Guy starts to harness residential bandwidth for evil purposes, equipment will recognize track unusual traffic patterns better, and simply log and shut down ports.
Whose afraid of the big bad fiber user, even with poor security? nobody really..

One thing that a lot of people don't seem to know about DSL is that your provider doesn't necessarily have to be your phone company. I chose a relatively small provider in my area that got lots of great reviews. They have to deal with the telco regarding line issues, not me. And they've been great with service, much better than the telco itself. But I don't know if such providers exist in your area or if the local laws allow the telco to have a monopoly on DSL service...

Check out DSL Reports for more info on your area, and post a bad review of the company if you're sick of 'em!

Whenever I wanted to verify that my Southwestern Bell DSL service sucked, I went to dslreports.
They have an area specifically for ISP Reviews

Whenever I wanted to verify that my Southwestern Bell DSL service sucked, I went to dslreports.
They have an area specifically for ISP Reviews

Check DSL Reports for a much better view of the world.

I helped set up multiple locations for friends when I was at school in upstate NY as well. RR there has dropped that asinine login system, and furthermore, provide up to 3 free IP addresses per modem. All you need to do to activate them is to call, and tell them that you have multiple machines. the buggers are active within a minute, and it was great.

However, the story changes dramatically in Saint Louis area. DSL Reports has information on DSL in the area, and reports that DSL may be available in my area. The reality, however, is that coverage is spotty at best, and DSL is not truly available in my area. Instead, companies such as Primary Networks and other CLECs rely upon SBC to determine whether they should even send a technician out to the customer sites. It seems that these companies are spending more money on advertising DSL than implementing DSL. The site is full of horror stories regarding the slow speed in which the installation takes place, and spotty at best service record of the various ISP's and SBC.

My coworker, who lives in Maryland Heights, MO, states that CableAmerica's cable modem service installed quickly, and he is now enjoying 500kbps downstream/128kbps upstream bandwith. This service was installed within a few days of ordering, and it went without a hitch.

Of course, AT&T Cable does not offer a Cable Modem service where I live, so I'm pretty much SOL for broadband. Get me back to NY. PLEASE.

For every succesfull DSL install I have heard about or read about, there are 5 others out there that are real horror shows.

Take my install with Fastpoint (ISP), COVAD (DSL) and Verizon (Telco). It is rapidly approaching 6 months since I originally ordered my ADSL and I have yet to get a synch up. Its not that I live in an area where DSL is impossible (at least 2 others in my neighborhood have it through COVAD). Its not the fact that Verizon is now on strike (you'd have to chop 5 months off the current install time for that to be the problem.) It definately seems to be the fact however, that a) my ISP doesn't push hard enough with installs, b) COVAD has no power over the lines they install DSL on, and c) Verizon has absolutely -zero- clue and -zero- interest in making a loop DSL ready.

So, I certainly doubt this will be the last of the law suites we see against DSL providers. They are all making claims they can't live up to and preaching their own special versions of the truths of DSL installation (average 21 day install time my ass.)

Anyone that is thinking about getting DSL certainly owes it to themselves to check out http://www.dslreports.com. I certainly wish I had before I signed up for the install hell I've been put through. I've already completed round 1 of my complaints to both the FCC and BBB. It felt good to do it, even though I doubt it will have any real impact.

All DSL/cable providers should be this good...

I use USQwest's 256k DSL service -- which in my case is 256k up and 384k-512k down. I was getting 640k down at my old place which was much closer to the CO, but my new place is right at the end of the line when it comes to DSL, and on rare occasion the line quality will really deteriorate (extreme packet loss) but 99% of the time its just fine. I'm really happy with the service overall.

sounds like you were too far from the CO, didn't they test that before-hand?

a great source of DSL knowledge can be found at http://www.dslreports.com/

I have the dubious honor of being the first paying customer for Nevada Bell DSL -- now a part of SBC Advanced Internet Services -- in Northern Nevada (the Reno area). My service was installed over a year ago. At the time, I elected to go with "Nevada Bell Internet," a re-brand of PacBell Internet...and an unwanted step-child it was, too.

In the early days, NBI was using bridging mode instead of PPPoE, so it was no problem at all to shift the install from the Windows 98 system I stuck in front of the installer to the Red Hat Linux system that functions as my NAT firewall.

Because of a number of issues documented elsewhere (dslreports.com) I fired NBI and went with another ISP, a then-local company called Pyramid.Net.

One of the reasons I went with Pyramid.Net was the promise from the operator that they would continue to use bridging mode, instead of moving to something like PPPoE. They have kept their promise.

Pyramid.Net is not the only "partner" to SBC to provide briding mode access, which is a true always-on service (as opposed to the necessity of logging in a la PPPoE) with a surprisingly high availability.

Moral of this tale: go with a "partner", not the [A-Za-z]+ Bell Internet company.

The newsgroup comp.dcom.xdsl regularly carries postings from people with horror stories. Note particular those stories told by Bell Atlantic customers...

Wow, if I had moderator points today, I'd bump this comment up another notch. I just tried DSL Reports and found lots of great information. After checking with several ISPs, I was under the impression that I was too far from the CO for DSL. It turns out they were all using erroneous information from Covad and my CO is 262 feet away (which I was kinda suspecting...). Time to look into DSL again!

This is good for those who are just about out of the loop for getting DSL or have a Cable company which isn't even equipped to roll out Cable internet in the general area of the Cable building.

You can check for DSL subscription rates and service areas at DSLReports, but they themselves claim that phone companies may disagree with the distance or service areas we provide you with.

Cable and DSL providers are not equipped to handle the millions of people who would love having a broadband connection now, what makes you think they'll remedy this by November 2000, rendering this standard useless? I've been checking with BellAtlantic over the past 2 years for DSL, and they haven't even come close to exdpanding their service area to my home. I doubt they will compensate 2 years sloth in the period of 5 months. Nevermind Cablevision's arcane method of rolling out Cable Internet to its customers (its only available in Rhode Island and Connecticut, while its main offices are in New Jersey). Whatever spruces up my Dial-Up internet connection is a good thing in my, and any other Dial-Up user's, opinion. The only bad part is that I'll have to find a hardware-based modem that supports the new standard.

there are dsl companies and then there are dsl companies. now, by no means, is any dsl company going to be aces in every issue on every day. this is a new technology and we happy few (depending on your prespective) are the beta testers. it took a good 3 months of investigation before i chose my dsl provider. it was not flashcom. it was not bellatlantic. on customer service issues alone these two stink up a storm. i definately recommend a visit to DSL reports before you even consider signing up. my basic view of bell atlantic is that they are using their monopoly at the CO (central office) level to leverage their own technology. nothing that can be proven but the many complaints i hear about bell atlantic messing something up (missing appts, using your line for someone else, etc.) seem mighty convenient for them.

<RANT>Believe me, if you are thinking of going w/ just Bell Atlantic as a means of reducing complications, think again. I went through 6 weeks of tech support, at least 12 different support technicians, 3 different support managers, 2 different line technicians, and 5 C.O. trouble tickets to find out that they never actually provisioned me on the ATM network.</RANT>

I am also a Flashcom customer. We are serviced by Northpoint. The first 3 months of service sucked horribly. Outages every 10 days....constant calls to tech support, and listening to that damn hold music.....But after a few tongue lashings, something happend at Flashcom, and things got a whole lot better. First off, I think that they actually have the man power to deal with all of their customers, and have instituted some sort of QA. Also, the bugs in our connection finally got worked out, and we have been operating with out problems for a good while now. I can say that things get better with time with Flashcom (at least for us), and hope you the best.

PS Check out dslreports.com for some very good info on DSL providers.

I use Bell Atlantic at home. I am at their mercy at work via third-party providers.

No matter who you go with in BA's service area, you're stuck with their incompetence when initially getting hooked up. There's not a thing you or anyone else can do about it. Nonetheless, you should by all means go with a different service provider. Getting connected is an absolute nightmare even if BA is your end-to-end provider because they're unserstaffed and undertrained at all ends of the business. BA's different groups don't coordinate with each other or even communicate regularly with each other. In practical terms, it's as though you're dealing with 3 different companies when getting connected. Don't make the mistake of thinking that going with BA simplifies things.

At least with a company like Flashcom, you have a shot at decent, responsive customer support after the initial nightmare is over. And you have a shot at getting something close to the advertised bandwidth, since you're not hanging entirely off of BA's overcrowded routers and hubs.

I'm sure you've seen this URL a few times already, but it can't be recommended enough. http://www.dslreports.com

I figured I'd hear this eventually. I checked out DSL Reports to find out whether I could get DSL, since I knew I could not get the ADSL from the phone company because of my distance from the CO. While I was there, I found that I could get an expensive and slower DSL called SDSL (only 144Kb, and anywhere from $90-$125 a month) After some shuffling of bills and whatnot, I looked at the ISPs who provided the $90 service, and one was Flashcom. Fortunately, dslreports.com has user reviews. Flashcom was consistently the lowest ranked provider, so I went with SpeakEasy. It took 3 months to get it, due to some "incompatible pair" problem Covad was reporting that BellSouth was having. But, things did come online Saturday before last. Then, the next day, a storm blew out the line. Speakeasy has been easy to get support from, and they won't bill me until the line is back up and running, despite the fact that it was working fine for 24 hours before the storm. It's hard to get times for Covad to show up, because they are booked on weekends, but I have heard pretty good things about Speakeasy, but nothing but bad news about Flashcom.

I live in Brooklyn and recently got my DSL up and running. After perusing the bible for this sort of stuff (dslreports: if you haven't seen it go now!), I chose to go with Megapath, a very customer-service oriented yet still 3rd party provider. They were wonderful throughout, always polite and accessible, but I depended on Bell Atlantic (ex-NYNEX) for the lines. Long story short... Northpoint sends someone to test the lines and install the inside wiring within 2 days. Lines need work, Bell Atlantic sends someone in two weeks. They don't fix it, send someone "ASAP" (another three weeks). Third guy finally discovers problem is not with lines but with Central Office wiring. Another two weeks, so on, so forth. Once lines test clear, Megapath installer finishes the job in 1 1/2 days. Total Bell Atlantic time: 4 months-ish. Total everyone else installed: 3 Days.

The problem is not the 3rd party, but that everyone depends on the telcos for wiring, so you should still check out all of the options for best price and installation, since all providers in your given area are gonna depend on the same folks for the wires anyway. I probably could've gotten a faster install if I'd ridden their asses a bit more, but why bust a vein when I knew from other people's experiences that this would probably take forever anyways?

But the line works great now that it's up, I'm almost always connected near the max, and the Megapath people's customer service is excellent.

We live at the northern tip of Bell Atlantic's NJ local landline service area. According to Bell Atlantic we live in a completely different county to the people on the other side of town - calling my stepdaughter's grandmother, who lives 5 minutes walk away but who has Sprint as the local carrier, is a local-toll call.

Because we're so remote from the rest of Bell Atlantic's operations (38000 feet from the switch according to dslreports.com) our quality of service sucks. It took three months to get both of our lines working successfully - they eventually fixed it when I started talking to their repair people about getting a third line installed (which would have had to have been new copper) and cancelling one of the other two. Calls to their service department were a joke, as I started treating their estimated date for someone to come out as an opening gambit in a negotiating session, rather than a hard position ("Someone will be out on Friday morning", "Come on, that's 3 days away - I know you can do better than that. How about late afternoon tomorrow instead", "I'll take a look and see if there'll be anyone nearby then").

After all this, we can't get more than a 26Kbps connection to the web, and our voice line is useless in a rainstorm. We can't get DSL (too far away from the switch), towns 10 miles away from us don't even have cable TV service, so we've little hope of cable modems, and we live in NJ's Ski area (I bet lots of you didn't know NJ even had skiing!) so wireless reception is spotty to say the least.

Considering I'm still hoping to get one form of phone service that works consistently, and I live less than 50 miles from the biggest city in the US, I think that it's still a bit of a stretch to imagine a near-term situation where lots of people in the US are completely wireless.

DSLAM......is that acronym a creation of yours, or the phone company?

And if you don't believe me check out the forums on http://www.dslreports.com, which also has help for those of you struggling with DSL provider policies.

is the way to go, was at least for me, and if you burrow into its pages, you get to see some real nice monitoring going on, including of water levels, IRC users, squid objects.. you name it.

It groks SNMP, but, has a real simple way of running a program to return the critical values for a given thing that doesnt happen to run snmp agents.

It simply handles year/month/week/day graphs without keeping boatloads of data.. the data is simply combined as it gets older, so log files do NOT grow.

It takes very little cpu. A halfway decent box can monitor a hundred routers and create html graph pages for them.

A lot of people have written patches & addons etc for it.

It only costs a CD from cdnow.com to the author. and thats optional.

Check mine out.. i put this up in 30 minutes. It monitors my eth0 interface, and i dont even run snmpd. My sdsl line