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Given that this guy was hoping to avoid restrictions, I would recommend avoiding Speakeasy like the plague. Their policies are very arbitary. I once ended up with a tech support person on the weekend who couldn't fathom what traceroute was. For typical home users, that may be acceptable, but for the /. crowd, you want Megapath.

According to logs, the virus attacked my machine from the 64.x.x.x starting at 9:30 am EST (US). This is the megapath dsl/dialup IP addresses. Lots of unprotected home machines. Whee.

Odd. A smiliar attack hit me once around September 4th, but only tried the cmd.exe exploits.

Let's here it for the wet napkin Security!

No complaints here about anything from them, except when they scared me at first by only promising a connection in 5 weeks - but put it in in six days instead. Since part of this involved waiting for PacBell to connect, I guess they didn't want to promise anything they couldn't be sure to supply because of the third party's involvement.

currently in SF, my home DSL is rated at 160kbps for $69/mo throught Megapath (via NorthPoint in the past, but soon to be through some other vendor as NP is
out of business).

There is a good, short explanation of what factors limit DSL speed. I know that I can increase the DSL speed to my home to a max of 1.1Mbps, but the rate was a bit more than I wanted to spend. I have not seen anyone locally providing the theoretical max of 7Mbps mentioned in the above article. The only people with that level of throughput to their homes (that I know of) are using cable modems.

I use Megapath and they're excellent, but since they've apparently stopped taking residential accounts I recommend people investigate SpeakEasy as well.

Today I saw that Speakeasy has a GIF ad that says "Speakeasy -- We Pay our Covad Bills": http://www.speakeasy.net/images/dsl/silver-speak-h eader.gif

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.