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O'Toole's Commentary: "Murphy was an optimist." (fraserlandia)

I have been a customer of LMI for many years. They are quite geek-friendly. Things may have changed but when I got DSL they didn't even offer DHCP - if you bought an always-on connection you got a static IP. They don't block ports or have funny bandwidth caps either. They will run email/DNS for you or, of course, you can run your own. I don't think they operate outside the SF Bay Area, though.

At home, I have 1.5mb down/384k up (COVAD/LMI) for ~ USD80/mo.

At work, I have 1.5mb down/128k up (PacBell/PacBell) for ~ USD40/mo.

I'm happy to pay the extra USD40/mo for my home connection, because its so much more reliable.

Lanminds

Unfortunately, they're one of the few remaining in the bay area. However, they've been around for about 8 years now AFAIK, and they show no sign of being bought out. I have DSL service through them, and I have to say that their service is excellent. It doesn't go down every couple of days like PacBell's does (shudder), and when you call their number and ask for support, I've NEVER failed to get a Human Bean. Plus, they offer free shell access :) What more could a geek want?

tachyon will. latency over satellite is terrible though..

Yes yes, we all know that you have high latency with a satellite connection. Perhaps one day we'll have communication laser contact with satellites doing optical routing and it'll get better. In any case, the real problem with Tachyon is that it's expensive.

The second tachyon retail partner I tried actually had pricing on line. (Never trust an ISP which doesn't have their pricing listed on the website, by the way. If they lower prices later, you may never know, and continue getting shafted.) But here's the real kicker; It's US$4250 for the "access point"! (Leasing options available). I wonder what it costs to lease; They don't tell you THAT on the 'net, which is a warning sign. Furthermore, installation is $950! Let me get this straight, you're going to come out to my property and anchor a dish which for that price should be aiming itself, and charging me a thousand dollars for the privilege?

But here's the really crappy part; The LOWEST level of service (C1-Lite) has a 300K (Is that Kbit, or KByte (note capitalization)? they don't say, of course. Since the downloads go up to 2 Mbps, though, you can see it's just Kbit. Not very exciting, really, since for 300Kbps down and 64Kbps up, you pay US$400 a month (on top of your four grand of hardware and grand of install) and you only get 1GB of bandwidth for the whole month.

This is ridiculous. The only impressive part is that if you get the expensive version (2.0Mbps down, 256Kbps up) you can actually get two megabits out in the sticks. I'm not horribly impressed by that except that somehow they must be funneling a hundred Mb up to the satellite or something. The high end service lets you get 10GB a month (or is that send? or get OR send?) but it's (get ready for this one) US$2099!

As much as this service costs, you'd be better off getting, say, half a T1 to someplace which actually has access and has LOS to your location, and then using the Laser-based ethernet to get 1mbps from wherever your T1 is dropped to your house; Microwave is another possibility. While somewhat expensive hardware-wise, you can get 768Kb T1 for around $500/mo if you poke around. You can also get 768K SDSL from Covad (in covered areas) for, uh, much less. They seem to have changed their website around a great deal. They also think DSL is not available in my area, but I have pacbell DSL right now, and Covad's hardware is in the telco, so I happen to know I'm within range.

BTW, Covad's webpage is indicative of weak management. They have two different forms to check for DSL availability. Oh wow, ANOTHER one just popped up, make that three. This is pretty pathetic. (Then again, so is this stream-of-conciousness /. post.) Okay, so I finally found it. 1.54Mbps SDSL from Covad through LMI.net will cost you $335/month.

Anyway, the whole purpose of this long, rambling, mostly pointless post was to step all over tachyon, which is ridiculously overpriced.

Oh, and one last comment on tachyon; They want like $500 for a de-icing unit. (I closed the page in disgust already, so I don't know just how much.) But for $500 I'll buy myself a snowsuit and a bucket, and go de-ice it myself.

tachyon will. latency over satellite is terrible though..

Yes yes, we all know that you have high latency with a satellite connection. Perhaps one day we'll have communication laser contact with satellites doing optical routing and it'll get better. In any case, the real problem with Tachyon is that it's expensive.

The second tachyon retail partner I tried actually had pricing on line. (Never trust an ISP which doesn't have their pricing listed on the website, by the way. If they lower prices later, you may never know, and continue getting shafted.) But here's the real kicker; It's US$4250 for the "access point"! (Leasing options available). I wonder what it costs to lease; They don't tell you THAT on the 'net, which is a warning sign. Furthermore, installation is $950! Let me get this straight, you're going to come out to my property and anchor a dish which for that price should be aiming itself, and charging me a thousand dollars for the privilege?

But here's the really crappy part; The LOWEST level of service (C1-Lite) has a 300K (Is that Kbit, or KByte (note capitalization)? they don't say, of course. Since the downloads go up to 2 Mbps, though, you can see it's just Kbit. Not very exciting, really, since for 300Kbps down and 64Kbps up, you pay US$400 a month (on top of your four grand of hardware and grand of install) and you only get 1GB of bandwidth for the whole month.

This is ridiculous. The only impressive part is that if you get the expensive version (2.0Mbps down, 256Kbps up) you can actually get two megabits out in the sticks. I'm not horribly impressed by that except that somehow they must be funneling a hundred Mb up to the satellite or something. The high end service lets you get 10GB a month (or is that send? or get OR send?) but it's (get ready for this one) US$2099!

As much as this service costs, you'd be better off getting, say, half a T1 to someplace which actually has access and has LOS to your location, and then using the Laser-based ethernet to get 1mbps from wherever your T1 is dropped to your house; Microwave is another possibility. While somewhat expensive hardware-wise, you can get 768Kb T1 for around $500/mo if you poke around. You can also get 768K SDSL from Covad (in covered areas) for, uh, much less. They seem to have changed their website around a great deal. They also think DSL is not available in my area, but I have pacbell DSL right now, and Covad's hardware is in the telco, so I happen to know I'm within range.

BTW, Covad's webpage is indicative of weak management. They have two different forms to check for DSL availability. Oh wow, ANOTHER one just popped up, make that three. This is pretty pathetic. (Then again, so is this stream-of-conciousness /. post.) Okay, so I finally found it. 1.54Mbps SDSL from Covad through LMI.net will cost you $335/month.

Anyway, the whole purpose of this long, rambling, mostly pointless post was to step all over tachyon, which is ridiculously overpriced.

Oh, and one last comment on tachyon; They want like $500 for a de-icing unit. (I closed the page in disgust already, so I don't know just how much.) But for $500 I'll buy myself a snowsuit and a bucket, and go de-ice it myself.

There's cgicc, which you can get here