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Thoughts On Third-Party DSL Providers?
drut asks: "Due to a power surge last week, I lost my link at home. As a result of this, I've learned the frustrating truth of how my DSL provider processes its work orders that have to deal when the actual DSL line is involved. My provider, Flashcom, works with Covad and Bell Atlantic to give me Internet access. Due to legal issues involved in the ownership of the physical phone lines, I spent a week just having them go through the red tape of contacting one company, having them issue a work order with another company, then having the second company issue a work order with the third company, making me three times removed from the problem. Because of this system, no one at the first (Flashcom) or second (Covad) companies have any idea of the status of the problem, and don't have any contact information for the third company (Bell Atlantic). With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies. " Has anyone else had problems like this?
Our friendly Telco monopoly here in South Africa has deemed DSL an illegal technology. We have imported two DSL modems and use them to link our two offices but we have to hide them whenever the telco engineers are about. A third party DSL provider would be great.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
It seems very poor form that the company from whom you get your service, doesn't keep you in anyway informed about the status of your connection.
Even if they source it from somebodyelse, that isn't YOUR problem. These are the basics of a service industry.
I personally haven't got a problem paying a little extra for a good service, and wouldn't hesitate to drop a provider if they didn't provide the desired service.
ys
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
I used to work for an ISP and customers that had line problems didn't usually take that long. While we did have to go through Bell it only took a short time to diagnose it as a line problem. We would then contact Bell and they would issue us a trouble ticket. They would usually send someone within 2-8 hours (depending on time of day). I imagine Bell's own ISP would probably go through the same channels (though they would probably get higher priority over a small ISP). As for Cable Modem I have @home. Their connection is usually pretty fast, but I seem to get intermitent service late a night sometimes (3-4 in the morning). Never had any long term problems though.
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
so i would suggest you try to get the contact information for the owner of the line as well and find out your line number. then you can directly call the owener of the line to fix it.... you just should make sure that it is really a problem with the line. but you see on your DSL when the physical link is broken. after contacting the primary provider and ask if the other end is OK then the physical line can be the only problem.. greetings mond.
When I contacted AT&T, they said that they hadn't gotten around to installing digital cable for internet access in my area yet, but that they would do so probably by the end of July. I wasn't thrilled with this prospect, since I spent almost seven months in my previous residence in Portland, Oregon where I would be told it was available in my area one day and that it was still a mile away the next. I gave up after half a year.
PacificBell claims that there is absolutely no way I can get DSL in my area at this time and that they have absolutely no idea when or if I'll ever be able to.
Now, keep in mind, I live in the absolute heart of the Silicon Valley. A short drive from everything from Netscape and Sun to 3COM, HP, Apple, Cisco... In fact, I am within walking distance of Covad at this very moment. Yet for the life of me, I can't get anything beyond a 56k dial-up account.
Someone recently reccomended I look at Covad, but having just spent this evening browsing their site, I'm not quite sure how they fit into the picture. Is my phone company still involved? Does this mean I have to deal with Covad (they provide the DSL lines, perhaps?), my ISP and the phone company? Wow. Talk about beauracracy. For $90, plus tax, I can get 144kbps bi-directional DSL from some area DSL providers, according to links I found from Covad (But I'm not sure if this $90 is just the fee for the ISP or if it includes the DSL line, too? how does Covad get paid on this?). Unfortunately, higher speed seems to be impossible since I'm slightly over 20,000 feet from the main switches.
I'd really like to know what some experiences are with Covad and some DSL providers as I don't have much choice where I am and I'd be interested to know what process, what fees and what kudos or rants anyone may have with specific relation to Covad (and how they fit into my actual physical DSL and my ISP). Perhaps much of this is RTFM, but I kinda gave up on their site for the evening and moved on until tomorrow when I have more energy.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Yeah - be thankfull you don't live in South Africa - it took 10 weeks to install a simple 64k leased line in our offices - we have no DSL options, or cable options at present. Our Telecommunications Monopoly is holding South Africa back big time - still another 2 years to go before the Monopoly comes to an end. Count yourself lucky you have these kinds of services. Even getting a normal home telephone installed here can take over a month !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I, too, had Covad as a line provider a couple of years back (Epoch was the ISP, PacBell was the ones that actually owned the physical lines into my house).
Not only do they have an unfair advantage when competing with PacBell (in price, as well as complexity); they also appear as the "Bad Guys" in front of the customers.
In this regard, they are not that much different from long distance companies. Various charges that are levied against them from local telephone Co's are showing up in your long distance bill.
The moral of this story is that monopolies are evil and they should be destroyed. Penguins are OK.
Iv had just about the same problem or similar problem in San Diego. We have had great service from our local isp and decided to take them up on the DSL offer. They contract everything out to a third party, several companies/contracts/service providers later, you get to Pac Bell, Once they give you a clean pair, not telling if any of the diffrent people you have to deal with along the way have any idea on what they are supposed to do. We have seen several confused faces run around the house, pull apart phone jacks, then just bail and schedule work from another company. I would like to stay with my local ISP, but it looks like if you use the telco all the way atleast you work with one company. Most of the ISP's dont seem to offer much better pricing for service might as well just suck it up and stick with your local baby bell. I does leave a bad taste in mouth to see this them control this so well, while other companies have such a hard time to compete.
I'm a local ISP provider in Oregon (in a small town) and we were aproached by a DSL provider. I/we felt it would be a bad idea just for the reasons you talked about. We would have no access to server information and when the fit hits the shan, we'd be lost. 7
My studio - www.graylands.ca
The phone line, however, is a slightly different beast at it is provided by Bell Atlantic as they are the 'telco' and Covad is the ISP. Bell Atlantic won't have any provision for connecting you to the internet (except if they have their own ISP division) and are just concerned with selling a high speed line to connect X to Y.
It seems as if Flashcom purchased your DSL system off their provider (Covad) who then purchased the physical line connecting you to them from Bell Atlantic. If it was just a problem with your ISP connection, then it could have been dealt with Flashcom - who would have referred major problems to Covad to see if it was their end.
Yep, it can be problematic, but that's the way companies work - all around the world (for example, Beebware Internet is a reseller of ConnectFree which is a VISP of Telinco. I deal with front-line support to Bebeware, but major problems get referred to ConnectFree who refer them to Telinco. I'm prevented to going direct to Telinco because of the contract I signed. It gets annoying for the companies as well sometimes) :(
Richy C.
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Delay: It required over four weeks from my order placement to installation. This may be better now, but knowing PacBell, I doubt it.
Improper installation: The PacBell technician screwed up my installation, and my voice line was down for two days. Two calls to two different PacBell numbers were needed to fix the problem.
Emergency IP number change: This was the big one. I was without service for 72 hours due to an "emergency" IP number change PacBell forced on Flashcom. I've had other outages, but probably none more than 12 hours long. These turned out to be Flashcom-related, mostly with routers going down. February was awful and I almost cancelled, but I can't remember an outage since March. I did have a line problem in April but that disappeared mysteriously. (Probably just mice in the line.)
Tech support: Forget contacting Flashcom during business hours on Monday. I've been on hold for four hours before and gotten no response. However, I did get instant response during off hours and even once during a non-Monday weekday.
PacBell sucks. I used to live in a BellSouth area and got much cheaper service calls and 24/7 tech and customer service. PacBell probably has more customers (just a guess based on coverage) and forget calling them at night or early in the morning. They just aren't there.
Overall I'd have to say I'm fairly happy with Flashcom, but they are handicapped by some really stupid local telcos. I also hear they're one of the best DSL providers, so YMMV (probably downward). The people I know with cable modem are happier than I am, I think, since it's a bit cheaper, and I'm not sure my connection speed is any better than theirs when taking a time average.
My DSL line is provided by a small ISP in my town. USWurst(USWest) does not yet provide DSL to my town, and probably never will, so I lease a latta circuit directly to the ISP. It works great, but last time something went wrong, it took USWurst a week to figure out who technically owned/controlled the line. (them or my ISP) having a fast connection, then having it go dead for a week really sucks. As soon as my contract is up, i'm thinking of going with a wireless connection.. I hate dealing with USWurst
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If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I have used PacBell DSL for a year now, as well as several friends with their multi-IP setup hosting small personal web-sites.
IMHO, you have little to gain from going to a third party provider, as the DSL link is little more than an IP address, and the physical wire.
PacBell basically rips you off, by providing a 3MB mail account, and a 3MB web-site for the $10/mo that they charge you, but it's clear that they own the pipe, and leave little if any room for a third party to get involved in the DSL $$$ action
Get realistic here: Even though they're a monopoly, they are providing a service not too different from regular phone service. You pay them for the pipe, and if you want fancy news-server access (think: long distance carrier / other value added voice-phone services), you pay them the mandatory $10 for it.
The biggest problem with your situation is that the company you get the service threw does not have direct comunication with the company who owns the sub system.
The company I work for, downcity, is making sure that we have very good comunications with the company we connect to up stream and actually own the system.
please excuse my grammar and spelling. I have been awake for less than 20 min.
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If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.
I go through Sprint (my telco) for my DSL. Service with them is wonderful. There's never been more than 3 days turnaround on any work order. "Let me put the phone down while I go over to the multiplexor." is a direct quote from my last tech support call. They don't support linux, but as long as you let them come in and install on a windows box, they don't care what you do from there. Just be sure to ask them for the DSL to Ethernet modem rather than the internal WinDevice solution.
"My religion is to live --and die-- without regret." -- Milarepa
Speaking as a network admin/engineer/monkey, this behaviour does not surprise me. Many times when we lose a T1 line, there's a problem getting the local telco (LEC) to respond in a timely manner. We can yell at the telco we actually bought the line from until we can't breathe, but we can do nothing to the local telcos except ask the main carrier to continue to escalate the issue with them. On the few occasions where we have directly contacted the LEC because of a problem isolated to their portion of the circuit, we've been rebuffed since we're not the main carrier company. This sort of behaviour is perfectly normal for a local telco. If I had to go with DSL, I'd either go with a company I worked for, or directly from the local telco to make service calls less of a problem.
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
I get my dsl line through GTE and use a different ISP as my service provider. It was a bitch and a half to get working correctly, although its been nearly flawless since I got it going.
The big issue is that GTE and my ISP can't possibly isolate a problem without having a conference call to discuss it. GTE will check all their settings and everything will be correct. My ISP will check all their settings and everything will be correct. The fact that my ISP was using the wrong settings but thought they were right will not be discovered until the two companies talk. Of course, I need to be on the line at the same time to assure that whatever they're doing to fix it actually fixes it. Otherwise there's a 2 day long behind the scenes battle before telling me they fixed the problem, with no change in service.
This really isn't a big problem, as I said.. once it started working, it stayed working without additional assistance. But GTE isn't exactly well known for stability and I'm really shocked that it has worked as well as it has, and I can't help but worry that sometime in the future (before I move) they will do something silly to change all that and my stability so far will go down the drain and I will require lengthy phone conversations, lots of hold time during hours I normally sleep. Can't wait.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but potential Bell Atlantic ADSL customers will thank me... I would think twice before going straight to the phone company for ADSL (BA Infospeed). I've gone through the tortureous process of having Bell Atlantic set up my ADSL account simply because no other provider offers it in my location. The account was originally started three months ago and the circuit has only been *operating* for 5 weeks total. The rest has been downtime. The simple fact is, Bell Atlantic doesn't give a about residential customers when it comes to data lines. I've spoken to over 15 BA technicians from Tier 1 up to Tier 3, been promised return phone calls at least a dozen times out of which NONE were actually returned. IF you can't call between 5:30AM and 6:00AM be prepared to wait at least 2 hours on hold; and thats just to speak to a Tier 1 technician who is prohibited from doing anything but following a checklist for your Windows 98 configuration (is DHCP enabled; is DNS disabled; is WINS disabled; etc... ad nauseum). Of course ANY other operating system including Linux, Win2000 or NT is completely unsupported. Be prepared since you HAVE to go through this checklist EVERY time you call regardless of what you tell the technician. There's a minimum of another hour on hold to speak to Tier 2 should this checklist fail. Oh, and you cannot be transferred to a Tier 2 technician without the explicit approval of the manager of the Tier 1 tech. This approval takes approximately 30 to 45 minutes. All this because they deleted my profile and had to recreate it; a process, I was told by the Tier 2 tech, that takes no more than 5 minutes to correct. Of course this horrendous tech support might only affect the mid-atlantic region, but who knows. I've actually spoken to several other BA ADSL customers in my area who have had the same problems repeatedly. To make a long story short, stay away from Bell Atlantic ADSL. While you may not like having three companies to deal with, the seperate tiers of techinicians at BA operate in the same way; they are in different buildings (actually different states) and never talk to each other regarding your problem except when they transfer you back and forth on the phone, nor can they find out what the other technicians are doing. The rest is trouble tickets getting passed back and forth. There is no worse feeling than spending over 40 hours on hold and waiting several weeks for a fix that is supposed to take 5 minutes... But then again, getting 178KB p/sec on downloads is pretty cool now that it works.
With the ones I have been involved with from an engineering and implementation standpoint they mostly used a redback switch as the main engine and in very cludgy ways wired in the authentication systems such as Radius. Most of the tpp are also selling batter and ground for local loop service that adds to the complication and because of this they don't own any repeaters because the costs are to high to integrate the DSL repeater with the local loop. This rsults in only getting access within a couple of miles of the CoLo. Anything further is done through resale agreements with still other DSL providers.
I finally had enough in my Bell Atlantic service area and went with a cable modem instead. So far service has been great the speeds are more than fast enough and as long as you secure your box in a reasonable manner it seems to be pretty secure. I get the service for about $34 a month and have wired all the workstations in the house through the one cable modem and this turned out to be much cheaper than the DSL service and with the exception of one outage when a telephone pole was hit near my house, service has been 100%.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Bell Atlantic is well known for blocking competition in ways very similar to what you are describing, that is, not cooperating in a timely manner with third parties. Bell Atlantic is trying to expand into other areas. The regulators are using that as a wedge to open up competition by Bell Atlantic (according to newspaper articles about the issue).
If you have cable TV and your provider offers internet access then you could switch. But cable companies traditionally have a lot of complaints about their service as well. I am not sure you would be better off.
Hey - that's how it goes. Provider points at carrier. Carrier says "there's nothing wrong here - check provider." Provider says "there's nothing wrong here - check carrier." And in the mean time Bell Atlantic [oops - I mean the carrier :-] has fixed the "non-existant" problem, and the provider says "hey - there's no problem here - you're nuts!"
It's happened time and time again. I'm in the financial markets, and the rule is that we don't accept line installs before 4:30PM EST (until the major markets are closed). I've had Bell Atlantic agents yell at me when I refused them early entry. In general, most RBOCs are terrible, from a professional standpoint and an ethical standpoint.
But we all still pay our monthly phone bill...
I have the Bell Atlantic's DSL and I'm sorry to say that they are not any better. If you have any type of problem, they take your call assign a ticket number and then tell you "If your problem persists in three days call us back and open a new ticket."
They used to call you back and let you know the status, or call the CO directly for updates for you but in the last several months they have eliminated that. Now, you just wait.
I have had DSL for close to 18 months from Bell Atlantic. Originally there product was based on static IP addresses and recently they have moved to DHCP and the PPPOE standard. When I made some changes to my account at the end of March, they needed to convert me to the new standard. I was given April 6th as a new activation date with the new setup, which was about 2.5 weeks from when I called the changes in. SIX weeks later, they finally got my account functional and it took CONSTANT calls to support from me and hours on the phone.
To make matters worse, up to recently you could wait 1 hour to get through to the first tier support. After they found that they could not help you, you would wait another hour for the second tier of support. I have to admit that has gotten much better recently.
In summary, stay away from Bell Atlantic at all costs. You would think that they would be able to handle difficulties more quickly, but I think it is better to have a third party fight your battles for you. If you have lots of free time and a hands free phone maybe you won't mind.
-BKuhl
I'm with Pacbell at home and Covad through Internet Connect at work. The work situation is better and faster all around. The problem is two fold, first Flashcom....... nuff said. (Don't want the guys here to get any more nasty grams telling them to remove comments *sigh*) Second PacBell, the response time you got is almost Identical to the response time we get operating straight from PacBell. I've been arguing with them for a while because what the say we are getting (784 up and 1.5 down) isn't what even THIER people test our line speed at (256 up and 784 down) However because our distance from the DCO says we should get the higher speed they still want to charge us for the higher speed. Until now I've gone from disatisfied to totally appalled at how far behind the rest of the Telco's PacBell seems to be. Then to make it worse I've found out that I could have gone to CompUSA bought an INTERNAL DSL modem for our firewall, installed it myself and had DSL in a week at the same speed for only 49.95 a month. arrrrgggghhh. In short, Don't blame the problem on anything other that since you're in Silicon Valley where everybody and his sister are out to get rich of all of us DotCom millionares (yeah right) Sorry but the truth is that the desire for broadband internet exceeds the ability of any of these organizations to implement it. Also the laws for right of way and easement for laying the lines are still out of the early 1900's and designed for Gov controlled monapolies, not the best situation for what is needed these days. The best thing I can tell you is be calm, polite and friendly on the phone(everyone else yells at them so that makes you someone they want to help) second when they tell you it can't be done, begging is a viable option. It's degrading but it works. If you've been nice up to that point I've found that things "magically" happen that weren't happening before. Finally don't be afraid to bug them a little calling everyday if needed. It got my six week install date moved up 5 weeks!, and I deal with much of the same people. Also complaining about how much money it's costing you won't hurt either.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
The same thing happened to me and is still happeining today to a friend of mine here in the DC suburbs.
I ordered service from Speakeasy (because of thier friendly service agreements). Speakeasy ordered DSL from Covad. Covad ordered a line from Bell Atlantic. BA missed their first two appointments to set up my line. Eventually, after about three weeks of delays, they got around to it.
At the same time, my brother ordered DSL directly from BA. His line was in the same week. Who could have predicted that?
BA was sued in NY for this and settled out of court. Since then, my friend (who also ordered service through Speakeasy) is still waiting. BA has missed three appointments, and when they did finally showed up, screwed it up. Details, suprisingly, are hard to come by. So, two months later, he is back to square one.
BA's intentions and incentives are not hard to figure out. I suppose that the NY settlement only obligated BA to equitably service customers in NY. We might have to take them to court in every state they operate in... More lawyers making money...
- jeff -
P.S. With a lot of DSL companies, you own the DSL modem. Your ISP, Covad, and BA (or equiv.) have no obligation when lightning or power surges fry your modem. Remember to install line and power spike supressors on your DSL equipment.
They have an utterly horrid reputation among the DSL community of being unresponsive, delay-prone, and having billing problems galore, among others. I think it's a matter of trying to be too big, too fast. That said, I'm a happy customer because:
(a) I only use them for my home pipe and DNS - I provide my own mail and web server. Unless I'm down, I only have to contact hostmaster if I create a new host entry. Other than one outage in August that lasted about a day, I haven't had any reason to contact support or billing since I got the service last spring.
(b) When I got the router, I configured it myself and they don't even have the password. So if I want to cange something I don't have to wait for them.
The way DSL installs work is that the DSL provider (several companies like Covad or, in my case, Northpoint) leases the UNE (Unbundled Network Elements or, in this case, the copper loop itself) from the ILEC. They pay around $8/month for this. Covad provides the DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexer) in your CO, too. They partition it into several VPN's, one for each ISP that they work with at that CO. Flashcom is just one of the ISP's that works with Covad in your area - they provide the "value-added" services of email (outsourced, but I don't remember who), web hosting, Usenet (outsourced to Supernews), billing, etc. Most of the DSL ISP's, ironically, outsource in turn virtually all of their operation but the billing and DNS.
In fact, here in Massachusetts many of Bell Atlantic's Infospeed DSL customers are actually wholesale customers - serviced through a different ISP.
The biggest problem for DSL service is this: DSL is a non-tariffed service (unlike, say, POTS, ISDN or T-1). There's no service guarantee associated with it, and if it's out there's no grounds for you to report anyone to your state's DPU. If your ISP is unresponsive, that's a problem in getting the wholesaler notified properly. If the wholesaler and ILEC are on bad terms (Covad has a reputation here for a fairly adversarial relationship with BA), then the ILEC may "misplace" service requests for a while - that's just how they are. For $8/month, the ILEC generally isn't too motivated to help out.
One thing that can help is to cultivate a good relationship with the local ILEC techs if you have the opportunity. Who works on what at a CO is rigidly determined by rules (ILEC techs are not allowed to touch stuff belonging to their co-located CLEC's), but if one of the techs is friendly with you, they may just take care of the problem if they happen to hear about it. Easy fixes can happen that way.
As far as the CPE, you own that - though Flashcom bought it. Your contract paid for it. If it's burned out, you should be able to contact the manufacturer yourself and get it replaced. Or you can settle the matter by buying another one - DSL routers are getting cheap. Good luck either way.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I once thought about getting Flashcom. Do a search on Slashdot for Flashcom, and you'll see why I didn't
I have NEVER in my life seen a company as small and as new as Flashcom rack up so many complaints in such a short time. The horror tales of being unable to get anyone on the phone (except for salespeople) for weeks at a time would have been enough to scare me off if there hadn't been the ridiculous long contracts they want you to sign - and the "random billing" of credit cards that Flashcom is known for.
I have a moral issue with using phone companies for ISP's. Here in Arizona, US West is busy letting rural telephone customers languish in a limbo of bad service, long repair delays, and frequent outages - while at the same time they throw tons of money upgrading the infrastructure in the cities. Yeah, that's where the money is, but they ARE a monopoly - we theoretically have competition for telcos in AZ but in practice very few companies survive the barrage of lawsuits US West files to anyone who dares to enter the market. This could be why they're being sued by class action lawsuits in both Denver and Arizona.
US West has unlimited phone lines, and undercuts regular ISP's by about 50% (US West Internet is about $10-$15/ month for dial up). Their DSL service is not bad, but it bothers me to give them more power.
Dancris Internet in Phoenix is pretty good - one nice thing about them is that if there's a problem with the DSL line, they'll call the phone company up and argue with them so that you don't have to.
I guess this has been kind of rambling, but the point is, don't judge DSL ISP's by Flashcom's behavior - if you do the research, you'll see that Flashcom is not really a reputable company.
Frankly, Id say this in a problem with Flashcom. I tried in Jan of '99 to have them put in a DSL line to my house. 8 months later (consisting of phone calls, ignorals, refusals, and fingerpointing) I canceled and called Rhythms. 2 months later I had my DSL line.
And I still am having line problems with my DSL. You got to get on your provider so they can get on their provider who will get on the local Telco. Local Telco normally could care less, I tell them to just get on the pole nowadays no being nice, chatting etc. I would say complain to your PUC, but that is probably all former executives from your Local Telco...... :-
Rumor even has it that Ameritech's service was so bad at one point that the public service commission was suing them.
Our situation improved when Ameritech ended up placing a Litespan cabinet (basically a central office in a box) co-located inside our premis. Then we could just look at the box ourself and tell our T1 providers if there were any alarm lights.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Most telcos seem to have their collective head where the sun don't exactly shine, doubly so when it comes to relatively new technology. Meanwhile, the cable companies are jumping on some really cool technology lately (cable modem, HDTV, etc.).
Technology is cool.
Gee, I thought the US had no problems at all getting DSL or cable up and running, and that WE were having a hard time. I work at an ISP that, amongst other services, has been selling DSL for about two years. In Switzerland, Swisscom's monopoly is still very much intact. Swisscom is the company that was formed when the federal telco (and the only one we had back then), Telekom, was privatized. Competition on the telco market has only been allowed since around 98, and that's why most of the copper still belongs to Swisscom.
So a client contacts us to get a line, we have Swisscom offer something and send their offer to the customer directly. The customer signs our contract as well as Swisscom's, and that's basically it. About a week or two from that moment, the line should be up and running. At least if you're not more than 8 km away from the next switch. When there are connectivity problems, you have a choice of calling us (and we will relay the problem to Swisscom if we didn't cause it) or Swisscom directly. Since every installed leased line has a serial number, and every Swisscom leased line contract includes a support number to call, the client is independent.
It would still be safer to call us, because we can check if the problem's on our side. I've seen quite a few ISPs, and most of them have a similar setup. Some (the other one I work at, for example) have their own copper and therefore won't have to contract or outsource anywhere along the way.
What's really scary is that Swisscom is thinking about offering DSL service through their own ISP, the blue window. They have the largest market share already, because they didn't play fair when they started. We pay for local calls, much more for long distance (anything above 10 km), and they were the first to get a "local rate at any distance" sort of ISP number. Figures, their mother company (Swisscom, remember) created this type of service specifically for them. Well, thousands of clients flocked to the new ISP and dozens of local ISPs died in an instant from the shock. Local ISPs couldn't even get such a super-special number until about two months later. blue window has been riding on that wave of customers since then... The world's not fair. But I digress..
Your main problem is using Flashcom. They have the reputation as one of the worst DSL providers in the country. Don't take this is flamebait or a troll but check out the reports on dslreports.com. I looked there before I got my DSL line. As far as dealing with 3rd party, I have lines through both Covad and Northpoint. I've had problems with both of them. I think it quite honestly is the nature of the beast at this point. DSL providers are horendously slammed with new orders and I fear that at some point they will need to put a moratorium on new orders and catch up any outstanding calls they have at this point.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Is this unfair? Yes it is. Is it illegal? Probably. Does anyone care? Doesn't seem to be. The phone companies are looking to take over the ISPs role, and DSL is just apart of the game. But I guess with everything going on in the pit of vipers that is the corporate world, is this all that important? I guess not. Anyway, I am stretching my NDA anyway. I do feel 31337 to have an issue that I can't comment on due to a NDA though.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Other people in town (town == Atlanta, BTW) also use PPPoX, and also have big problems, though many are better than the awful BellSouth. None of these people support *nix, either.
A shining star in the whole area is Telocity. I have two friends now that have Telocity. A couple of days after BellSouth did the underlying phone testing and switching stuff (which took a while) Telocity had the DSL modem there and the service turned on. The DSL modem has a bunch of ports on it, so you can connect with your Ethernet port, USB port, parallel port, serial port, etc. It also comes with instructions on how to set your service up, on a nice little card that has three sections, from left to right: "Unix, Windows, Mac" I believe. You get a static IP address, and (from what I understand) if you move from any city to any other city that Telocity is in, you keep the same IP address. I thought that was cool. And there's no additional setup fee if you move. And the contract is month-to-month.
Anyway, it seems like they are extremely knowledgeable and have very high-quality service as a result. Though you still have stupid BellX that has to do a lot of the work, they will do the hassling for you, and once it's set up they have superior infrastructure and support.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
You should see the deal with cable... Ooo boy. Where do I start?
Here's my little fiasco, time organized:
January 28th: A line tech from AT&T comes to my apartment complex to adjust tv problems that were reported. He does standard operating procedure, adjusts the line amplifier of the cable. The non-standard, idiot thing to do in his case was that he amplified the *whole* line to the condominium. So when, in fact, he overamplified the line, he caused the sensitive modems in the whole building to lose connection.
Throughout the next month, I made 14 (!) calls to AT&T for them to fix the problem. They missed two scheduled work orders during this time. Others called as well, which is probably why it took AT&T comparitively so little time to respond...
February 28th: Finally, AT&T trucks come out to handle a line amplifier problem, after a month's outage. This inefficiency was due in part by the fact that AT&T has a very inefficient, decentralized system - they will not just send out a line tech even though they know you have a line problem. Every time I called, I told the support technician (even higher level 2 technicians) told me all they could do is schedule a work order for a regular tech (who can do only a normal check up, no line work).
The current situation: I believe my line is still under/over amplified, or there is some other unknown problem that is causing a horrible line connection. Example of the crap I have to go through: My gateway ping is never lower than 100. This means I never get pings lower than 100. What's worse is that this factor of lag increases during the day (because of the load of the condominium and the surrounding area on the node) to about an average 350 (!)gateway ping. This is slower than AOL, folks. My bandwidth is still normal, though.
This problem only started since Feb. 28th - that's why I believe it's a line problem. Later in the day, it is coupled with node overload - but it can not be solely node overload, because 350 ping is just too much for pure node overload. Since February 28th, I called AT&T 38(!!!) times to solve this problem. No go. This time, they either missed their work orders, or their techs that have come over have told me that they'd set up a line tech. None of the scheduled line techs came (they usually aren't, but these techs said they can make it so).
If you are going to recommend me to other high speed services - don't. I have checked DSL providers in my area (despite that there's less bandwidth, I am willing to lose that in order to frag), and there are none close by. The closest one is tantalizingly 300 feet outside my range. Ug.
The only thing I can get is IDSL (I believe) which is about 128 kilobits throughput (I can settle for low bandwidth but not that low). So cable is basically my only option.
If only AT&T, the raging monopoly, would open its cable lines (which it is never going to) it would help problems of customers such as me...
What can I say but "Oh well"?
P.S. sorry for my crap writing style - it's 6:20 A.M. :)
I live in CA, and after reading newsgroups for a few weeks, I decided to go ahead and sign up for PacBell DSL service. Since they would provide everything from my fingertips to the backbone provider, I figured that if there was ever a problem, I would only have to deal with one entity to get a solution, right?
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-
WRONG!!!
See PacBell (and I'm willing to bet any other phone company) doesn't just have one department that does DSL. In fact, it involves a total of four groups. There's actually six if you count the quality assurance and legal departments.
Here's an example of what this so-called "unified" services is like:
A month ago I started getting this problem where all of my downloads were timing out. I would get download speeds from 40-50KBps (from smaller sites) to upwards of 150KBps (from PacBell sites or major providers like download.com). The problem is that after a random amount of time, the transfer would abruptly stop and time out. This happened with all protocols. If I tried to download a file with a web browser, it would get maybe 10% then stop. If I tried FTP, it would get around 10% then stop. Same with IRC and ICQ. Small files had the same problem. If I loaded a web page with a large number of small images (like a menu or whatever), I could count on a few "X's" from failed image loads.
So I called PacBell Interent (company #1). They provide my ISP services. They pinged me and verified I had a connection. End of service, please call the PCO and have them check your line. So I called the PCO (company #2). They manage the line from my house to the DSL modem on their board. They telnet or something to my modem and verify the upload/download settings are correct. They ask me to download a file from a specific website. Of course, it works. I immediately try from download.com and it fails. They explain that they aren't responsible for problems off their network. Please call the network center (company #3) to report poor service. So I call the network center and then ask me to run tracert a bunch of times and then ping the slower hops with increasing packet sizes. I relay the information and they tell me there's nothing wrong. Please call the order center and have them verify a line test was done. So I call the order center and they tell me that my line qualified for high-speed access (which means I should not only be able to get the speeds I am getting, but actually much faster if I was willing to pay more).
At that point they referred me back to the ISP group to see if maybe I didn't understand what the problem was. After enough ranting, I got put in touch with some quality assurance group to see if they could resolve it. Eventually I told them that if it wasn't fixed, I was going to small claims court to file for a refund of the $200 modem and $50 DSL fee. That put me in touch with the legal department who basically said "fine, whatever, we'll believe it when we see the subpoena".
Anyway...the point to all this is that don't think you are saving anything by going with a single company. DSL right now is a mess any way you look at it. If I could do it all over again, I would have stuck with my cable modem. Sure the speed was sometimes deplorable and there were outages practically every week...but at least with enough bitching you could get transferred up the tree to people who actually know something about the problem...instead of getting transferred to people whose only skill is giving me a phone number and passing the buck.
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Here in Ontario, Canada, the only affordable DSL service for the individual is ADSL Lite. Initially it was only offered by Bell Sympatico, but after some good work by ISP's and the government regulators, it can now be offered by ISP's. I resisted switching ISP's especially to Sympatico after hearing lots of horror stories about mail problems, and other difficulties.
By getting DSL service through my ISP, Trytel Internet, I achive the following.
1. Mail that works
2. News that works
3. In my opinion, a faster backbone connection.
4. Service 7 days a week.
5. An IP address that doesn't change every few hours.
6. A point of contact that knows how to deal with the telephone bureaucracy when something goes wrong.
In summary I just have a better degree of comfort dealing with a smaller organization that will get things done on my behalf.
I would NEVER go with DSL. I am a Systems Administrator and I have to deal with Bell Atlantic all the time and there level of incompetence baffles me. Why would you chose a technology that ultimately relies on them? Apparently Cisco thinks this is a good move, because they are going after the DSL market. I would sell your Cisco stock if you have any. The Bells have ruined so many businesses. I have @home cable modem service and I am very satisified. I had my cable scheduled to be installed in the morning and the cable modem installed in the afternoon. You have to have the cable installed to use the cable modem. I was expecting delies or one of them not to show up and waiting a few more weeks, expecting better service than Bell Atlantic! I was totally surprised when they were installed correctly and on time. Did I mention that I scheduled it only about a week in advance? I have had the service for two months and no problems. This is entire senario would be completely impossible with any Bell company. The service is so much better that I predict DSL to fail and cable modem to suceed. If cable providers get into phone service it will only accelarate there downfall.
This is the way tho whole DSL and third party thing works but to understand you need to see the whole picture and the players. To get DSL you need the following:
1. Line provisioner (phone company).
2. DSLAM.
3. Modem.
4. ISP.
Sometimes, as with 3rd party setups, there is another step that includes an installer.
All ISP's that do DSL are dependent on the presence of the DSLAM which is usually, I said usually, provided by the telco. COVAD has been installing them in some places which is where they come in. Otherwise they simply broker the connection between the telco and the ISP.
When something goes wrong the ISP usually gets the call and must go through COVAD to get resolution because their contract is with COVAD, not the telco.
The setup for the ISP I work for, which is owned by the telco, only lacks the 3rd party step. The customer still calls us but we have set up a system by which any reseller of DSL (other ISPs or 3rd party folks) can submit trouble tickets on the line. If the telco has put the proper infrastructure in place then any 3rd party group can get information about the line. Only the telco knows about the line. COVAD merely handles any DSLAMs they may have installed themselves. If they simply pay to get access to the DSLAMS then it falls back ultimately on the telco.
But the customer doesn't care. They want service and don't care who does the calling. Most likely each entity wishes they had more control over the situation, but the telcos still have the ultimate control. We all forget that modem connections used to have the same reliability that DSL has now. DSL is barely 3 now. It will get better and more wide spread as time goes on. Somedays mine is great, somedays it sucks. I give them more slack because I know how the technology works and everyone is working to make it better. The future depends on it round here where I work.
Myxx
----------
Twisted Little Gnome - The Podcasting Network http://www.twistedlittlegnome.com
As with any DSL provider, some people have problems and other people have great experiences. But Telocity has had their approval ratings take a nosedive over the past couple weeks so I think something might be going on . . .
Then again, I could be wrong.
I have no
Having worked with both of the major DSL carriers, and with all of the Bells on the East, I can say that this is a real problem. Bell Atlantic has a 3 day window to just begin working on a DSL line if there are problems with it! That's 3 full days, not to mention the fact that it is often on day 2 or 3 of customer (you) downtime that the order would even reach bell! That means you are probably going to be down for a week.
I some of my conversations with Covad employees, i've had them ask me, what problems I encountered with their service, maybe we should get a list of the issues, with people's names, and present it to them. They aren't totally to blame though.....
Bell Atlantic originally signed an agreement saying that they would deliver lines to a length of 45,000 ft. They turned around and then told Covad, that they would only deliver lines to 18,000 ft, because they didn't want to pay for the repeaters in the lines! They had already signed an agreement, and now they decided they wouldn't go through with it.
I think that we should begin some forum, so people can begin listing their problems for everyone to see. I would also like to see things that people did, that helped whenever they ran into problems. I would be willing to get a website going, if anyone is interested.
Um, this is my sig.
I know my folks had signed up for ADSL through Bell Atlantic where they live in central NJ. After working for about a month the link went down -- and after an entire month of talking to people on the phone and trying to convince them that it wasn't a problem with the computer, they finally had the line shut off. Two days later a bell tech came out to check the line, and had a fix in 10 minutes. Now they're looking into cable...
We've had some similar problems with our DSL provider (DSL.net) in terms of mixups/screwups with the telco (SNET) - and other problems. After a particularly bad week (several days of DSL outtages, a *big* screwup involving SNET, etc.) we started looking for other DSL providers. There aren't many. And after talking to some of their 'technical representatives', we discovered that in this area, there just don't seem to be many who know what they are doing.
...
Right now we are putting up with our current DSL, warts and all, and hoping that in time, the industry will mature
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
I'm not sure if anyone has posted from the perspective of an insider, but I am an order specialist for Covad.
;). Couple that with a few ISP's who don't seem to give two damn's about their customer and we heve problems. I can assure anyone reading this, that *I* will do my best if I get your order and there is a problem with it.
;).
I am a firm believer that Covad offers a very good product, not just because I work for them, but because once the customer is set up, you don't hear about outages or downtime like some other DSL providers.
The order process is not as smooth as it could be due to the fact we rely on the ILEC (phone company) to install a new line at the customers site (line sharing is coming soon). The ILEC seems to treat us like kicking dogs due to the fact that we hurt their precious monopoly (and they lost in court over and over
We apprecate our customers, we know that the only way to survive against the odds is to treat them better then the ILEC (or for that matter our competition) would treat them (which, from what I hear wouldn't take much
I can only say that if we (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythm) go out of business, what incentive will the phone companies have to keep DSL? Hmm, let me see... charge them $100 month for T1 speed when we could drop DSL and just charge over $3000 (or so, I'm not sure of the current prices in the US) for a real T1. I'm sorry, but I seriouly doubt DSL would be available from ILEC's at all if it wasn't for the fact that we started provide it.
I'm not saying we should be put on a pedistal as the underdog "beating the monopoly against all odds" like Linux vs. Corporate Software, but at least see what may lie in the future if we loose the ability for anyone to compete with the phone company. Broken up or not, they all seem to have the same attitude...
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
I had a similar experience just setting up my DSL service. My Inet service and DSL service were ordered from USWest (USWorst).
Both the Telco DSL provider and Inet providers had different support lines and guidelines and would blame one another for the problems I was having. I won't go into detail to save time, but it was actually a mix of both of their problems. They constantly bitched and moaned how they're not able to be in "direct contact" with one another so that they won't have a competitive advantage and all.
Regardless of how accurate their claims were, it still gave both convenient excuses to make claims about who's problem it was that my DSL was not functioning. This just drew out the process and made it just as bad as if I still had an ISP from another company.
I had a very simular problem with GTE and was buying directly from the telco(and telco procedures ARG!!). I had a 1 year contract with them and was able to drop it becuase of their self addmitted failure to provide services. With 8 months of service i must have had at least 30 days down time. I live in Dallas where there is lots of competition for my money and they didnt seem to care. The employees at the company were in complete agreement that buying network services from a telco was an all together bad idea.
I now have a cable modem at home and havent had any down time. No contract and its beutiful. Take my advice stick with an ISP when you want anything over a wire. Telcos dont know how to be anything but a blood sucking inefficient monopoly.
Not to rant but, I think the sooner Ma Bell dies the better off we will all be. Telcos are the picture of a inefficient buisness model.
Ok, DSL horror stories!
Installed on Jan 5th, 2000.
Ordered 384k sDSL to start with.
Routers claimed a connection of 384k,
but thru-put was sub 20kbs. By mid February, we learned that our circuit was terminated in Philadelphia PA.
Our office is in Atlanta. Gee, wonder why the latency was so bad?
PSI blames Covad. Covad blames PSI.
PSI changes DNS in march, to make the router look like a SouthEast circuit, claims problem resolved. *cough*
Finally, in April, circuit actually moved to Atlanta. First hop drops from 75ms to 16ms.
PSI offers 2 weeks off the bill, for 3 months of bad service. Wow, aren't they generous. Avoid PSI, if you need biz services, consider Cais out of DC.
So far we havent had a problem with them. Only one of our 30+ clients with dsl had a problem, and that was because the telco had too much fiber between he and the CO.
As much as I hate to admit it (and I really do NOT like RBOCs), in all of our DSL problems, the only reliable contacts have been Bellsouth. One advantage we had: the Bellsouth technician, has worked our county for nearly 6 years, he installed our ISDN, the 2 T1s, and now has watched over Covad in the DSL.
Sometimes it does help to give that RBOC tech a cup of coffee..
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Heheheh. Have a look at http://www.dslreports.com and one will discover that, when there is trouble, just about EVERYONE gets hurt with DSL. It is irrelevant whether the entire setup is provided by "one" company, or through an ILEC/Link Carrier/ISP arrangement.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
On the other hand, I've had endless problems with the phone company they get their connection from. It looks more like politics than anything, with the phone company hell-bent on preventing anyone using any DSL service other than their own (which they've not even rolled out, yet).
IMHO, anyone having problems with DSL should send the relevent core-dumps to their local phone company, along with detailed descriptions of the application of fingernails to chalkboards.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I work at a small company that produces switches to do DSL/Phone service. I've been intimately involved with phone companies and I can vouch for the fact that they have their heads up their collective asses.
I also got an SDSL line installed earlier this year. It was a nightmare getting it installed, but it's been pretty reliable since (now that Bellsouth doesnt have much to do with it).
The REAL problem with the DSL system these days is the way that congress deregulated the local phone system in '96.
Phone systems and the like are what we call "natural monopolies". You dont want a dozen different companies stringing up lines on poles (would be messy and expensive -- poles only have so much space on 'em, etc.).
Congress basically didn't understand much about how the phone system worked, so they stated "Yea verily there shalt be competition for local phone service. Phone companies must lease out their lines for a reasonable cost." They then handed the ball to the FCC to have them decide the rules and what "reasonable cost" means.
Once the rules came out, the baby bells cried foul and took it to court (GTE was first I think), saying they couldnt make a profit on it.
This is why DSL has been so slow in coming. The bells have little interest in selling DSL services -- they'd like to keep everyone buying second phone lines and T1's for as long as possible, since they can charge more money for them, and dont have to upgrade their plant (my company faces this problem daily).
Thus we have a situation where the customers of the baby bells (flashcom, covad, et al), are also their competitors. Unsuprisingly, the service that Covad and others get is crappy.
I believe Covad has a standing lawsuit at the moment against several of the Bell's charging them with putting the most incompetent engineers on the DSL teams. I can corroborate this story, since it took around a dozen trips for them to get the line set up for my SDSL line (mostly stupid errors by the linemen).
Indeed they had to run a new pair of wires back to the switch from my house. You _can_ (technically) piggyback an SDSL signal on an existing voice line, but Bellsouth currently won't allow that. Covad has another lawsuit against them for this policy as well. There's no reason for it, other than to slow down the proliferation of DSL.
I think it would have been better to break up the baby bells further. Make one company that maintains the copper up to the switch, and a monopoly company that provides dialtone and DSL services. Then DSL providers wouldnt have to attempt to get decent service from someone who is essentially a competitor.
As part of my job, I handle networking and connectivity for my office (I'm a software engineer by trade, but I like to play with servers and we don't have enought people to justify a full time IS person).
A little while back, we got a DSL link for the office (previous connectivity was via a 56k dial up link that we kept up all the time.) My service is provided through my ISP (Netaxs). When I have a problem, I call them and they yell at Covad. If it's a wire problem, Covad yells at Bell.
After about a month of having the DSL link, it flaked out. We spent 2 weeks with the link down while Covad kept running the same 3 first-level diagnostics (unplug the router. Plug the router back in. Line check on the DSLAM. Reset the DSLAM. Rinse and Repeat). After a while, we got bored with this routine and I got my ISP to set my dialup account back up so that I can use it for a fallback internet connection (lesson 1: have the fallback plan in place from the get go). My ISP at this point also stopped letting Covad go through the first level diagnostic procedures. After a few more weeks of messing around (and of course refusing to pay anyone anything until the problem was resolved) we finally got back on line. No one was EVER able to tell me what went wrong. They just kept beating on it until it started working. At one point, I got so annoyed that I tried to call Covad directly. They REFUSED to talk to me. Their customer service line told me that I had to go through my ISP.
Since then, I've installed MRTG, and I keep graphs of the packet loss on the DSL link. When it gets too high or people complain, I fall back the dialup until it gets better and have accounting knock the downtime off the next bill. I end up using the DSL link about 50% of the time. I also told accounting to not pay the bills for next month's service, only for the previous month. Needless to say, no one likes this, but I'm NOT giving them money for service that I can't trust.
I've been told by the folks at my ISP that the only possible cure for my ills at this point is to get bell to give me a new pair back to the CO. But since the company is moving in a month, it isn't worth our trying to force Bell to do that right now.
I've also talked to some other folks in the field and have been told that the reason DSL is so service-poor is that Bell isn't making any money on the deal. They apparently get about $15 a month for the line. At that rate, one Bell service call could easily erase any profits for a year or more. And frankly, they'd rather sell you a 56K line for a couple hundred a month. This makes Bell less than totally responsive. Covad is trying to install DSL everywhere all at once, and I suspec they are spread just a little too thin.
The basic problem (according to the folks I've talked to) is that DSL is UNDERPRICED if anything goes wrong.
Thanks for reading!
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
I live in GTE-land. Manassas Va to be exact, home of GTE and Jones cable and not far from DC. You'd think getting access here wouldn't be hard - WRONG! 3 years ago I decided I wanted high speed access after getting an ISDN flier from Bell (I'm just over the line). Price seemed right but I had to go through GTE. GTE's price at the time was literally DOUBLE the price of going through Bell and the difference was explained as "we're trying to get it lowered but the regulators haven't approved it". Yeah okay, spare me. Even investigated getting a Bell line dragged in but the tariffs would've killed me. Next I called my local cable company who was running beta testing for 'net access on the other side of town. 6 months I was told, just six months - thus began my wait. 6 months later I called back and was told 6 months again - and have been ever since only now it's "soon". Still no access. Lately DSL has been making waves - about a year ago I called GTE about it after their WEB site said it was available - even signed up for the service! After hearing nothing for a month I called back - ticket was closed and I was told I couldn't get service. I then heard from friends local to me that they had gotten a flier from the local phone store about service - it was available. Checked the WEB site, still there, called it in again and signed up - again it got cancelled and one surly rep told me I couldn't have seen it on the WEB as it wasn't available - I walked the jerk to the URL! My next stop was the phone store - no fliers! I asked the clerk about it and was told that they had all been thrown away?! Seems the main office was telling them it was available and to hand them out while the techs were telling them it was NOT available - trapped in the middle they pitched the fliers into the trash. Heard about DSLReports.com and ran my address through them - yippeee, COVAD offered service! Signed up with SpeakEasy and waited for the circuit. COVAD shows up to do the install and it seems GTE never showed up to tag the line. A call and a test is made - break in the line, GTE never did their part. Break gets fixed (apparently) but loop never gets installed - GTE says no pairs are available (?!). I wait 4 MONTHS and every 2 weeks GTE says sorry, no copper available at the CO. On top of this there's fiber in my line so I must go with IDSL for close to $80 a month for 128K (sigh). I offered to drop my second line to free a pair but was told this wouoldn't help - are they multiplexing something? I get 42K connects with a modem - ick. Finally the other day I got the word from COVAD - order cancelled, no facilaties available from GTE. I'm left standing on the side of the road, money in hand, and none of these idiots will take my money and provide service. My cable company still has it's head up it's butt - I've switched to DISH in protest. GTE still says ISDN is available - I may run the monkeys through that excercise next. If they can install IDSN but NOT have a pair for COVAD I'll be writing the regulators and getting them reamed. I'd take a Bell dialtone over GTE any day and will if I'm ever given a choice! P.S. No, I wn't use a DISH for 'net service. I wanted to host my own server and play online games. Sat dishes are mostly one way and the latency is terrible. I'd kill for terrestrial wireless or to get a line from Bell! Hell, I'm considering MOVING to get service!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
If nothing else, you want to stay away from Bell Atlantic as your DSL provider.
Part of the problem is that they take every opportunity to drag their feet when a DSL reseller is involved, but don't think that you'll get a lot better service if you're dealing with them directly. Nearly everyone that I know who has used BA as a DSL provider considers their attitude towards their DSL customers as a kind of uninformed apathy.
If nothing else they're doing a really terrific job of illustrating the very worst aspects of a monopoly.
jim
jim frost
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
to make a very long story very short, it took 3 months just to get my DSL up. A lot of it had to do with Ameritech screw ups, but it's hard to say how much of the blame lies elsewhere. One good thing though, as soon as I started posting an exact detail of my problems in the chi.internet newsgroup, telocity called and fast-tracked me (if you can consider three months fast-anything).
BA has a history of obstructing ISPs becuase they view the ISP business as rightfully theirs. ISPs have seen obstruction in getting lines, poor quality lines and obstacles to getting problems fixed and even creating problems from scratch.
If you give in and buy DSL from BA, you reward them for the dastardly tactics they've used in the past.
It's unfortunate that you live in a BA service area as I do. My DSL installation is scheduled for Friday. Wish me luck.
Hmmm. I hope BA dosn't read this post before then.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Here in Ottawa we have Bell Sympatico, a child
corperation of Bell Sigma, a child corperation
of Bell Canada. Bell Sympatico offers the ADSL
and dialup internet connections (no shell, no
web space, no mail forwarding, it's not really
dialup service, since there aren't all that
many services).
I myself subscribe to DSL via Magma Communications
Corp. Why would I do such a thing? 1) Magma
offers static IPs, and doesn't run their connections through a web-caching proxy. 2) Sympatico has to be the saddest run excuse for a buisness I've ever seen. Magma manages to get my issues with bell resolved much faster than Sympatico ever could. And Sympatico's "technical support" is a select group of lowest-common-denominator arts students, who aren't allowed to be on the phone with you for more than 15 minutes. Magma is also somewhat more honest about network outages, whereas Sympatico tends to down their entire network, and then have tech support tell their customers "Everything is fine, something must be wrong with your modem".
Grr... I get angry just thinking about them...
Keep in mind the core competency of a phone company is providing telephone service. They aren't internet companies, and if it's anything like it is up here, then they really don't know much about being an internet company.
Just my $0.02.
Disclaimer: I run a ISP that does exclusively DSL(www.acedsl.com). Hence, my views may be biased, but at least I know what I'm talking about ;)
/28 up to /24) to you. Generally, we have a clue ;)
;)
Firstly, lets go through your options:
1. Your physical line (local loop, last mile) is always provided by Local Telco (BA in your case).
2. Your line gets into CO. Now it has to be plugged into DSLAM (DSL access multiplexor, hardware that aggregates multiple subscriber lines into one ATM PVC.
CLECs put their DSLAMs in telco COs and lease local loop from them. ILECs have their own DSLAMs, and they are offering DSL themselves. However, telcos are obligated to let other ISPs provide service over DSL.
Now, the actual service funnies start:
1. Bell sucks. Really does. Anything they do, they are very likely to mess up, so you'll be better off dealing with them as little as possible.
2. Bell is impossible to deal with if you are "just" a customer (such as in case of Infospeed). You will wait for 3 hours on hold, and then you'll get to talk to a tech support rep whose only answer is usually "Reinstall Windows".
You are far better off dealing with your ISP who (if they are good) have a good (relationship/pull) on Telco.
3. CLECs: Bell hates CLECs. Bell is obligated to offer copper for 6-8$/month to them, but they do not really want to do that. Also, the lines are considered voice-grade service, and unlike a T1 (where MTTR is 4 hours), the guaranteed response is next business day.
4. If they are going through CLEC, your local ISP cannot deal with Bells directly. As a matter of fact, your ISP buys service from "Regional or National Reseller", who in turn buys lines from CLEC, who in turn has to contact the Telco. While CLECs aren't as badly messed up as Bells, they are still telcos, and they need to be pushed, yelled, whined at to get anywhere. If your ISP won't do that, you are not likely to get any service.
5. Bell's own end-to-end service: "Infospeed DSL" in BA case. It is provided by "Unregulated Subsidiary" of Bell. Benefit is, it all is provided by same company, however, since this company a telco, they do not care. They have all the pull they need (its same company, really), but they just won't do anything. The attitude is "We don't care, we don't have to".
Technical support sucks (5 hours on hold until you get to talk to a "engineer" whose only response is "Reinstall Windows"), and they REALLY do not get IP. (Slow backbone connections, never give you a static IP, forcing you to use PPPoE which is a b*tch to set up for Windows, not even talking about *nixes).
6. Bell is also obligated to let other ISPs provide service using Bell's own DSLAMs deployed at COs, competing with Bell's end-to-end offerings like "Infospeed". This is what my company does, and in my (of course biased) opinion, this is the best option, since you are dealing with ISP that cares, and has a direct contact (and a push) on Telco. Most of time my partners spend on the phone is getting BA to follow up on trouble tickets, bothering them regarding installation dates, etc, etc. Of course, AceDSL isn't the only partner, check out remoteit.com and inch.com, who are also providing similar service.
Oh, we also support linux and (free/net/open)bsd, give static IPs, and even route networks (from
Also, please check out www.dslreports.com, its quite useful resource of user's reviews. It just so happens that flashcom has one of worst reputations, and in DSL business my company one of the best
Telco Jargon:
ILEC: Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier: Your part of Ma Bell, Bell Atlantic.
CLEC: Northpoint/Covad/Rhythms
The local phone companies take there monopoly as far as they possibly can. Try to signup for DSL service before moving into a new apartment! First, the DSL ISP needs your phone number, so they can ask the phone company to provision your line for DSL. In order to ask the phone company, your phone number has to be listed in the phone companies database. The phone company has one month to add your number to the database, after the switched on your service. Once the ISP put the work order in with the phone company, it can take about anouther month for the phone company to atually do something. Once they provision the service, not earlier than that, you will know if you can get DSL at all and at what speed. Forget measuring the distance from your Central Office. If your line is just 'bad', or if your neighborhood is connected using a fiber optic line, you are out of luck. Now after two months into the process, the ISP can send out a crew to install the service (if you don't do it yourself). Needless to say that once in a while the crew arrives to find out that the local phone company setup the line wrong, or not at all. I am personally a Cable modem fan (can't tell by reading this ;-) ). But would like the same choice of ISPs DSL users enjoy. I just hope we don't end up with the same mess once they have multiple cable ISPs. The way the cable ISPs behave now if you just mention 'competition' is not a good sign. Lets all go wireless!!.
The problem may be Bell Atlantic in general. We get our DSL directly from them and the service just royally sucks. There are often times during the day when things are flaky and service requests are always slow. So it comes as no surprise to me that your third-party service through them is even worse. Unfortunately for me, it's my only high-speed access option, so I have to put up with it.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
George Gilder had a great line: "DSL is equivalent to the Pony Express engineering winged horses to compete with the telegraph". It's an expensive kludge to hobble around the fact that the telcos need to rip out their copper infrastructure and replace it with fiber. Which they could do, if their upper management were cluefull.
Any service using the telcos infrastructure is doomed. Get a cable modem. Or get a big pile of venture capital and start stringing up you neighborhood with fiber-to-the-home. Or fixed-point wireless. Anything but the antiquated copper the telcos use.
Government regulators can't mandate cluefulness.
Like many others, I wanted to go with someone other than the local phone company's (SWB) DSL, but was told by Rhythms, Covad, etc. I was too far away from the local office. A call to SWB, though, revealed that I *was* too far away -- if I had copper -- but since I had fiber to the curb then I could indeed get DSL. I asked the phone company why the other providers didn't have this information (eg. who can receive VDSL via fiber) and they didn't have an answer (I really didn't expect the sales guy to know, but I thought I'd ask).
Anyway, it seems the trouble with RBOCs and DSL begin with the sales process and goes from there...
The installation went very smoothly and the guy who came out to my place appeared to actually have a clue about what he was doing. We got the line all set up and tested and I haven't had a problem since.
What's really nice is that concentric's target market seems to be small home office set ups. They explicitly state that you can run servers on your DSL connection, they just don't support it. With the service I have I've got a 768/384 line with 4 STATIC IP Addresses, and I haven't seen any unexpected downtime in the 4 months that I have had it.
So, I highly recommend them! And no, I don't receive any money from them, honest!
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
living in manhatten, I initially went with bell atlantic since they offered a good monthly rate and since they "owned" the phone lines. When I called up Concentric, they told me there would be close to a 2 month wait before I got the lines put in due to hassling with Bell Atlantic.
So I used Bell Atlantic for a month. 1 IP address, and the upstream sucked. So I called up Concentric and said get me on the list. 2 months later I got Concentric DSL. But only after Bell Atlantic people had to come in, between 8am and 5pm on a work day, not show up, and say they'll be there the following week. This actually happened a few times. Or once they had come in, Concentric technicians would come in, see what Bell Atlanic had done, and say that they hadn't finished the job. Basically, half-ass work all around. But the Concentric people were very kind, courteous, and answered tech-support quickly and efficiently.
I couldn't say that with Bell Atlantic.
This causes confusion with our customers, mainly because they don't understand that because of the FCC we have to keep the ISP and transport seperate. Also we have issues with people being bounced back and forth between the two departments, but that's a different story.
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
You've hit a problem dead-on, Cliff. I work for a largish facilities-based DSL provider, and we waited for 2 months to start service in one city because we couldn't get the Telco to string one 6-foot piece of cable. We were co-locating a DSLAM in one of their central offices, and damned if they were being any more cooperative than they absolutely had to be. I think it eventually took a report to the Public Service Commission to get things moving.
In many ways, it's like watching the fall of the old corporate dinosaurs. They know that the winds of change are blowing against them, but they're doing everything they can to pretend that their new competition doesn't exist. It's ridiculous how often we have to get federal agencies to force the telcos to do what they're required, by law, to do in the first place. I think that they honestly believe that if they close their eyes and wish hard enough then we'll go away.
We're here. We're staying. We're the CLECs, and they'd better get used to having us around.
My ISP, Rapid Systems, has provided great service both with the inital install and with any problems that have come up in the network so far and GTE has solved any problems with the actual wire quickly and without problems.
I would suggest looking into another DSL provider, but cable was slower and with a lot less features than DSL and should be avoided at all costs.
In my personal odyssey to get DSL access, I ended up contacting about a dozen providers before finding a decent one -- Flashcom ain't it. Every story I've heard about them involves much pain and suffering.
I ended up going with service from CAIS (WashDC-area provider) through Covad's backbone, it's been very reliable and their tech support's not bad. Their salesdroids are something else, but the engineers there seem to have their heads on straight.
I'm not looking forward to the hassle of moving my service now that I've gotten a new apartment, though, it took me 6 months to get it where I am now...
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"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
We have an incumbent monopolistic telephone supplier, British Telecom, who have a monopoly on most of the local loop. We also have cable operators and a few business oriented suppliers but outside of the large cities BT gets the lions share of the cake.
The are offering a service to ISPs for ADSL. It operates over a customer's existing line and the ISP incurs all costs. BT havedeveloped a 2.4Gbps nationwide ATM network over which all ADSL traffic is carried. When a customer is connected they are connected directly into this, they authenticate and a virtual channel is created allowing a direct IP connection to their chosen ISP. This costs a minimum of £40 per month plus VAT (17.5%) for the ISP per customer. The ISP must also purchase a "Central" link into the ATM network which costs upwards of £5000 per year for a 512kbps link (Currently the Central link is limited to 34Mbps but will be offered soon at 155Mbps and multiple central links may be bought)
This provides a basic 512kbps level of service with a single IP offered over an Alcatel Speed Touch USB modem, which is owned by BT, on a maximum contention ratio of 50:1. For a faster or network capable service you must go to a more expensive service which starts at £68 for 512kbps, a router and 20:1 contention ratio rising to £110 for a 2Mbps variant.
All these prices are before ISP service is applied, all lines have to be BT, the service is not yet available (Launches next month).
To make it even worse all contact, ordering, support has to be provided through the ISP. There is no way of checking with BT regarding faults or resolutions of problems.
I don't know wether this is better than the US way of things or not as I don't have experience of the US DSL situation but I thought some people might like to know whats going on in the other side of the pond. Visit ADSLuk if you're interested in any more details.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
This is no different than a typical residential home DSL service.
:)
The phone company has the wires
Companies like Covad/Northpoint put in the DSLAMS
The ISPs have the links to the backbones and provide your typical "ISP" services (web hosting, email, yadayadayada).
Sorry man, that's just DSL.
Glad my link is a wireless T1
- Darth Sidious | Chairman / CEO |Dark Jedi Network Services | http://www.dark-jedi.net
a day before the power outage (I'm in the silicon valley area), I lost phone service. and dsl as well. I just shrugged it off and figured it would be back in a few hours or so.
a few hours later, I finally got annoyed enough to call pacbell. now it seems that if you have adsl (the 'A' is important; sdsl doesn't have this problem) and you call 611 service, if you tell them you have dsl - EVEN if your whole pair is down, they forward you to pachell/dsl for repair.
I sat on hold for a full half hour. then got a message saying 'due to the unusually long (ha!) waiting period, we're forwarding you to a voicemail mailbox. [ok, that's cool I guess].
doh! the next message was 'sorry, that mailbox is full. please try your call again later'.
doh!
it wasn't until mid next-day that my phone AND dsl were restored. meantime, the pachell guys were trying to say that I had a 'short in the line'. man, they can't even tell when their own dslam is down! ;-(
bottom line: if your primary phone service is important to you, consider 'burning' a 2nd line JUST for sdsl. do NOT tie your voice phone service and adsl together in the same pair. if dsl goes down (at the main CO), it takes your voice circuit down along with it.
this is totally unacceptable. when I worked at a cable modem company, there was a lot of talk about voice-over-IP and if/when cable modems will provide 'dialtone' service. the prevailing question at that time was "would you trust your cable operator to provide dialtone, and at a high enough uptime so that 911 was trustable.
all I can say is: my cable still worked but my phone and dsl were down...
and btw, that 2nd pots-only line I have was ALWAYS working; it was only the dual adsl/pots line that was down. further reinforcing the idea that my lines were physically ok (no shorts) but that the CO someone screwed me over on my adsl twisted pair.
--
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Maybe others have had problems with Covad, but I place the blame on Bell Atlantic given the problems I've had with them for regular phone service. I'd ordered a second analog line recently; the work was to have been completed on a Thursday but wasn't done until late that following Monday. Why? They couldn't find the phone network interface box. Even when armed with detailed instructions from me about the box's location -- go behind house, open back yard gate, go through gate, walk to back of house, look for grey box with Bell logo on it immediately below huge power utility meter box, both by large firewood pile -- they couldn't find the damned thing. Three technicians came and failed. The fourth came out, found the box with no directions, did the work, and made the comment that his co-workers are stupid. Oh, and during this whole process they crossed my primary voice line with a neighbor's. Then, two days after the second line was installed, both the primary and new lines dropped out completely. I had to call their repair department on my cellphone, and the only explanation I got from them about why the lines were down -- and why it took five seconds to fix it -- was that they messed up. No details, just that they messed up.
I don't trust these people for regular voice service, and I've heard nothing about horror stories about bellatlantic.net. I'd go without xDSL before ordering it from them directly.
The minute I heard DSL was coming to Philly I grabbed it. I went with Bell Atlantic because it was the only game in town last year. I recommend going with them for DSL. I know BA works with Qwest, Covad, and others in supplying me with my service, but as far as I'm concerned, they're behind the scenes and BA has the clout and *obligation* to resolve problems with my service, no matter who caused them. BA was offering a service called InfoSpeed DSL and having CS friends who were involved in trial service offers back in college, I knew it would be great. Boy, was I worng. Like any new technology, there are plenty of bugs to work out when it comes time to actually apply it to custmers and business models. From the first time (there were three) they told me the "card is on it's way" to the first day I had more than 48 hours of uninterrupted service was almost 10 weeks. Here are some tactics I used to help me get the great service I now enjoy from BA:
1. as other posters said, communication, communication, communication. Get names, ask for explanations, ask for understanding, make calls to that CO, and always ask for the next level of tech support. You're not stupid, but BA thinks you are.
2. Ask for satisfaction. After 4 months of service, I had been down for so many weekends and 2 or three day stints, I added it all up and asked what they were going to do about it. It added up to 14 days. They gave me a month of totally free service.
3. Accept that DSL, no matter who the provider is, is not going to be perfect, yet. Just by having DSL, you are on the cutting edge of consumers who are connected to the internet. The trials you go through are learning experiences for you and your provider.
4. Since that free month, 5 months ago. Service has never gone down for more than 18 hours and BA knew the answers to my questions when I called. Yes, this is more expensive than cable modem service, but if you can do the setup yourself, you're saving some money.
5. Finally, is all of this unfair? Probably, but go with what makes the most sense to you as a purchaser of these services. Don't support a company just because you think it's a good idea. If they can't deliver the service you need, dump them. Go with a company who can be reliable. If you still want to go with the original provider, switch when they catch up (if they're still around). . .
locally here for my phones. I would recommend AGAINST going with BA for a couple reasons. 1. They use ( at least in the northeast ) PPP/OE and if you research it you'll see this is not a good thing 2. They are as restrictive on IPs and domain names as cable There is a company here called Harvardnet that is a third party provider that will do DSL at a good price give you any number of "justified" IP addresses doesn't use PPP/OE, allows you to setup your own domain on the setup etc etc... no I don't work there but I was looking for DSL for myself in this area...they were one of the very few that provided it....
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Hi!
Your post ends with the magic words:
"With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies."
As it happens, Bell Atlantic is in hot water on this very subject. The State of New York just fined BA $10 million for anticompetitive practices with regard to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission has gone so far as to require BA to divest their retail phone operations (so the "wholesale distribution" side treats all carriers equally). The state's Consumer Advocate is presently on a campaign about businesses that have been harmed when they switched to a CLEC, and Bell dropped all mention of them from directory assistance.
In other words, the regulators are watching. If BA is jerking around CLEC DSL customers while providing a different level of service to its own customers, that's anticompetitive.
Call your state legislator--ask him or her to ask the Public Utility Commission for information on resolving complaints about poor DSL service. You may have to explain DSL to the kid who answers the phone (he's a political science major/groupie) but legislators love constituent service opportunities like this. They will ask for pertinent information (so the letter can say, "My good friend Elmer Stutzenfreud (Circuit ID #17X933099J32, Covad ID# 234234234, BA Repair order #NY0339993A3) has mentioned to me the severe impact of a DSL outage on his business....")
Regulated monopolies have zero incentive to listen to consumers. But they live and die by the whim of the legislature--and the legislators know it. Call your state rep or state senator, and ask for help.
P.S.: There is a quid to the pro quo: when your legislator comes up for reelection he will ask for your vote. If he has done an effective job representing your interests, you probably should vote for him.
In my area both AT&T cable access and DSL through a 3rd party were available, so I investigated both. DSL here is limited to 385K downstream and 128K upstream, and you must wait weeks to get an install. Service problems can result in no service for days at a time. The cost is $59.95 per month. Cable access is limited to 128K upstream and no absolute limit downstream. The whole AT&T cable system locally is fiber optic and your downstream is limited by the speed of the server you are downloading from. The install was done eight days after it was ordered. I have had one problem: a local construction contractor cut a cable and AT&T repaired it within six hours. However my internet access still wasn't "up". I called the 24/7 tech support and they were quite knowledgeable and helped me to reset the Cable Modem and all was well. By the way the techie when he found that I used Linux asked me for help with his newly installed Linux system! He said that numerous of the support people were starting to use Linux at home. By the way the other day I downloaded the StarOffice 5.1a tarball. This was a 70MB download and took just under five minutes. I was impressed!
Doug Pearson "Support OpenSource and create freedom!"
PacBell does all it's IDSL through Northpoint, but of course the physical lines are PacBell.
So you call PacBell Internet (who for the first few calls denies you are a customer since IDSL isn't in their DSL customer database, and sends you off to data services, or phone line repair), they take a generic problem report which goes into the cue (mine sat there for 2 weeks before being forwarded to Northpoint). They asks lots of questions about operating system you are running, and other software questions (the modem sync light goes red, doesn't need to be connected to a computer to show the error, but they still make you answer all kinds of pointless questions).
Northpoint then makes a request for PacBell to check the lines. Eventually Pacbell shows up, diddles a bit, says it seems ok, and leaves. No contact number, no status, nothing.
So when it immediately fails again, you have no way to contact Northpoint or PacBell repair. You must start over with PacBell internet again.
Next time, Northpoint comes out, checks the inside wiring and modem (they just use a laptop and hookup a new IDSL modem to the outside wires). They call PacBell wiring again, who fiddles some more, again says it's fixed, again it's dead in a few hours. So we start the dance again....
You get the idea... I've been down for nearly 7 weeks.
In the meanwhile, my Cable modem has never been down for more than 5 minutes, and is insanely fast (often double the speed of a real T1).
Unfortunately, your situation is a rare and brilliant opportunity for all kinds of people to make money and not work. I have the same problem. I live in a pseudo-third-world country. To get to the Internet I have to rent a frame relay circuit from the (local) local phone company, pay a local ISP, and the (international) local phone company, which hooks into another ISP in the States -- when anything goes wrong the first thing all of these folks do is point the finger at each other (oh and us of course), and do nothing until we determine where the problem is on there behalf. And no matter what, they still get paid because there is no choice! If you have a choice at all, use it to influence these vendors. Vote with your dollars. Good luck.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Sometimes your local telco is even worse than third party. I have about 20 different DSL installations, most are based off Covad, a few NorthPoint, and 2 based off of the local telco (BellSouth Fast Access). I have had a million times more problems with Bell than I have had for ANY of my 3rd party circuits. The trick is to find a good ISP (try dslreports.com). FlashCom in reknowed for crappy customer service. I hapen to use UltraCom (ultradsl.com) and they have given me terrific service. On the rare occasions when I do have problems they are excellent in resolving them quickly and communicating the results to me.
My wife & I signed up for Marcus / @Home service. It is great when it works, but with outages of several hours, a few times per week, the overall service level is far below a dial-up modem. We are thinking seriously of going back to dial-up!
Because they study!
On Bell Atlantic's purchase cirle at amazon.com:
#5. TCP/IP for Dummies and
#6. DSL for Dummies
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
The $90 144kbps line is not true DSL, it is just 2 ISDN lines that are always connected so you never have to dial. They provide this for people that cannot get "true" DSL. Its kinda a joke that you have to pay more for less though.
My experience with Covad as a DSL transport provider for an ISP has been nothing short of a customer service nightmare on both ends, Covad's and my ISPs.
I ordered the minute the ISP I wanted to use began offering service out of my CO. I called for a status update two weeks after my order, only to be told that the information my ISP was getting from Covad was "NOT ENOUGH RESOURCES" which they didn't understand and repeated phone calls to the ISP couldn't resolve.
Finally after 2.5 months, I was told that the install was on track for two weeks hence. US West delivered the circuit (I have 768 down/384 up asymmetric SDSL service over a dedicated pair) on time, and the install was scheduled for Friday afternoon exactly 3 months after ordering.
Since this was a seperate-pair service and they were supposed to be able to do inside wiring, I expected a lineman-type guy and a techgeek. I did my own wiring, so the only thing that needed doing was termination of my wiring in the NI on the outside my house. Instead, I got *two* tech geeks who had to use *my* ladder to get into the NI. How they would have drilled the hole through the poured concrete foundation of my house that required a $400 hammerdrill to do when I did it is beyond me.
Anyway, they "install" the SDSL equipment (plug it in), and lo and behold it doesn't work. It's a speedstream 5250, so it has idiot lights -- no serial, no snmp, etc. They wait on hold for 45 minutes with their TAC to no avail. They they say "just leave it plugged in, and if it doesn't work by monday, call someone", and then they leave.
After having some "firm" conversations with my ISP about customer service on Monday, the service does come on...finally.
Although I find out two weeks later that Covad's ATM trunks between COs and their peering location with my ISP are oversold -- I can't get anywhere *near* 384k up to a T1-connected host on the same ISP I'm using at home (which was at work, which is why I chose this DSL service over cheaper ones).
It's taken me six weeks of wrangling with my ISP to get them to acknowledge this -- the ISPs engineering department wouldn't even return phone calls left by the ISPs director of technical support (big ISP, multiple OC-3s to multiple backbones, not a cheesy operation). I finally had to post a rant to the dedicated-connection tech list from my work account to get engineering to take me seriously -- that and the 24/7 throughput testing with charts and graphs that proved my point.
I'm expecting Covad out today to replace my CPE with a Flowpoint router -- why this will fix this, I don't know, but it has more geekness to it than the idiot box Speedstream.
My point here is that even good ISPs staffed with good people get totally perverted by outsourcing their network infrastructure to others, and Covad sucks rocks. As an ISP engineer told me, "There are days I'm surprised their network works at all."
- A day following a lightning storm, one of our clients goes down. I phone the regional SNCC (their service center) to open a ticket. Within about 45 minutes, they call me back to let me know that the circuit ran cleanly in diagnostic all the way to the CSU/DSU, which usually indicates broken hardware on the customer end. We go out to replace it, and voila.
- One of our client sites goes down for no apparently good reason. After having the client reboot the router (and power-cycle the CSU/DSU), we open a ticket with Bell. Half an hour later, the problem is magically fixed. Ten minutes after that, Bell calls to let us know that they ran a diagnostic on the line, but nothing was wrong with it.
- Driving into work, we see a couple of Bell guys working on an access point. We hold our collective breath. Shortly thereafter, our monitor detects one of our largest clients (500-1000 employees, and politically signifigant) has gone down. After a good deal of finger pointing, BA finally admits that their work on the access point had precipitated the outage, but that it was really our fault, since the setup there should never have worked in the first place, so what are you gonna do about it? Our response: if it shouldn't have worked in the first place, why did you set it up for us, and why did it work until today? And by the way, fix it, or our client is liable to sue you.
In short, the thing to remember when dealing with Bell Atlantic is that the weather may be bad, ISPs are usually clueless, and customer premise equipment is always faulty, but in the eyes of Bell Atlantic, Bell Atlantic is never wrong. As long as you remember this, you and Bell can get along fine.My problem lies along the same lines. My DSL provider told me that my new place of residence was well within the distance limit for the line I wanted. Three weeks after they were supposed to have started installation, they tell me I cannot get it because Bell atlantic has denied my work order because I am too far. Well, then they say that if they go thru another company besides Covad they may get it thru. OK....how does the distance change???? Is it that hard to get it right? Should I give up and go with cable??? ACK!!!!
"If you only knew the POWER of the DARK SIDE!"
I had an even worse experience setting up a DSL connection for one of the directors at my company. He bought two iBooks and wanted to use an AirPort base station to connect to the DSL modem. Because Bell Atlantic uses PPP over Ethernet instead of static IP addressing, there was no way to get their horribly broken proprietary client software to work with a Mac OS 9 iBook.
I went back and forth with them every day for over THREE MONTHS with Bell Atlantic never coming up with an acceptable solution. Finally I gave up and decided to go with another provider. Bell Atlantic told me that it was illegal for them to give me a list of other providers and that they had no idea who might be reselling service over their lines. My protests that this would make billing a little more difficult on their end didn't seem to get through to them.
Finally, I got in touch with another provider. I bounced around their voice mail system for another two weeks before they finally admitted that they were only going to accept customers from Covad because Bell Atlantic was impossible to deal with.
After a delay of several more weeks, I finally got the service running (with a static IP address) from an outfit run by two Russian guys working out of their apartment. Not exactly world class customer service, but at least the line has worked since then.
In all, it took close to six months between the time the order was placed and when the first packet went through the line. I spent hundreds of hours working on this and ranted at Bell Atlantic until I was blue in the face (their CEO never did reply to my emails).
Short answer: I would *NEVER AGAIN* recommend that anyone buy Internet access from Bell Atlantic. I don't know if other telcos are as bad, but this experience was terrible.
Having experienced cable and DSL I agree with you. I'm not sure how it works in the rest of the country but we get our DSL straight from Bell Atlantic, so when something is f*cked, there's only one number to call. Speed is great, works like a champ, no complaints here. The only real downfall of cable is that you lose speed as more people in your area sign on. Unacceptable, IMO.
Don't ask me about my month on Juno in between my old ISP and DSL though...(shudder)...
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
As soon as I found out I was eligible for DSL through US West, I made a call, and signed up for the service.
1 week later, I had the router in my hands and I was online. Now I just have to pay a $492 phone bill. Just to make sure I didn't get the run-around, I signed up with them for the Internet service as well.
Before I was able with US West, I decided to check with Covad for DSL serivce, since they went a little further from the CO. Unfortunately, their pricing is outrageous. Several hundered dollars for the hardware, and hookup fees, plus a yearly contract. You could get charged if you aren't around when the tech shows up, blah blah blah.
This is a sad, sad state of affairs (but the experiences that the author describes are far from uncommon). The reality is that as long as a single organization gets to mediate access to the physical copper plant *and* to make money off of advanced services provided on that plant.
We all paid for the copper decades ago. In fact, we paid for it again, because of some creative acconting that the Baby Bells (RBOCs) used in the late 90s (96-97) becuase they convinced regulators and auditors that they were planning on replacing the entire copper plant with fiber and so they should be able to write the whole thing off since it was worthless. Copper. Worthless. You know how DSL gets into your house? Copper. Hmmmmmm.
I work at an ISP that provides DSL from three different carriers, two of them CLECS (competitive local exchange carriers) and one an RBOC (regional bell operating company - US West). The three-party problems that the author described have been made *much* worse by Covad's unwillingness to deal directly with smaller ISPs (they now want a minimum 20,000 - 25,000 line commitment) so most of the people providing Covad DSL don't have a relationship with Covad; they are reselling DSL services from some other regional ISP (increasing the problems to 4 parties!).
One thing we keep telling commercial customers who are compelled by the low prices of DSL: When your T1 line goes down we have a $200-400 / month stick to beat up the phone company with. Mean time to respond for us (we have hundreds of circuits) is about 1 hour, mean time to repair is about 2 hours. When your DSL line goes down we have a $19 / month stick to beat up the phone company with and we can't even talk to them. We have to call the DSL carrier who has to beat them up with the $19 twig. It takes a week. Sometimes longer.
This is the key problem with DSL: enterprise speeds with romper room repair times. In the the current setup there is no obvious way to fix it.
France Telecom has this offering, "Netissimo", which is real crap. They had to open it up to other ISP thanks to the telecom utilities agency (ART). Initially, that is, during the beta test phase (which lasted something like 3 years!), when they were the only ISP (Wanadoo), they were using DHCP, which gave great performance and great pings (resp. close to 500kbps and less than 40 ms regularly).
Now, to accomodate with opening up their infrastructure, they have come up with a complex system involving PPTP instead of DHCP, and multiplexing ISP connectivity through a complex and already saturated ATM backbone.
On top of that, they have come up with a stupid limitation for ISPs whereby they are only allowing them to buy a limited bandwidth per customer -- this limit was initially as low as 6kBITs/s! Such a low limit comes from their broken market analysis. They had done their beta test by giving away connections to random people. However, the distribution of users amongst those who actually want to spend the money is actually quite different -- most casual surfers that were included in the initial test period did'nt want to pay, whereas telecommuters and hardcore gamers, who hit hard on the bandwidth esp. during peak period, being now a fair share of their clientele!
So they've raised the limit, but still to an uselessly low level.
Initially, for your amazement, I got a whopping 30kBITs/s max transfer rate and 1000ms minimum ping! Yeah, they have no clue how to configure their convoluted network. Apparently, they don't even know what causes such a high lag. And no, it's nothing to do with the actual ADSL technology: theoretically, you can get bad lag from ADSL at higher rates (4+ Mbps) if your line has too much noise (like when you're far away from the central). However, I'm a few hundred meters away from it, the line quality has been found good, etc ... and amongst users just about everybody experiences bad lags regularly, if not constantly.
Now we've started a user group to try to lobby France Telecom -- but it's hard to get a big corporation to actually give out any information (as opposed to smaller ISPs giving realtime info on their network for instance).
I pay something like $65 (450FF) for 512/128 kbps. Things have improved lately and I get about 400kbps and 100ms pings out of it.
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.
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
Just in case anyone whats to know what "way more" per month gets...
Crappy install. That's right. Install costs a whole lot of moeny (they bury a new cable), and it still sucks. It took Bell Atlantic a few months the first time, and two trips (once to bury the cable, once for a guy to attatch a Smart Jack) the first time. The second time it took somewhat less long for the first visit, but then they discovered they "forgot" to dig all the trench they needed, so I had the choice of having cable layed over my new neibors lawn, and across my roof, or waiting another few weeks. I choose the wait.
Once I got the service (56K FR the first time, about 5 or 6 years ago, 256K FR about 2 years ago) it has been great. A few outages (less then 2 "real" ones per year so far). Half the time the ISP calls me first (they tend to call within an hour of the outage, and I'm at work a lot, and not using the connection much!). When the outage isn't solved by rebooting the router (a Ascend Pipeline 70 with an old code load), and isn't a known Bell Atlantic trunk issue they will contact Bell Atlantic for me (I have the option of waiting on hold, being confrenced in, or having them call back). Most outages are solved in a few hours (which can seem like l-o-n-g hours if I was palnning on doing something). One took more then 8 hours, and was a big Bell Atlantic T3 problem of some sort.
Regretably this level of service seems just really expensave, and when I leave my current job I'll have to find something a lot less expensave, and most likely less reliable, or maybe just as reliable, but with longer service wiat queues.
However if reliabilty is a big issue, and your employer will pay for the line, you may want to try Frame Relay from one of the bigger ISPs (I would recomend UUNET, but since I work for them, I'm a bit biased). If cost is a big issue, then stick to cable modems or DSL. And hope LMMDS shows up soon, and is better.
ADSL is slowly making it's way here. And it's doing a lot better than in the states by the sound of things.
KPN, our monopolistic telecom provider, is offering ADSL in a few select cities, at only 512 or 1024 Kbit/s. All, ofcourse, for outrageous prices.
Recently Cistron, an ISP, started moving into telecom to directly compete with KPN. (The first, by my knowledge, company to offer telco services besides KPN) They offer ADSL for half the connection fee (about same monthly fee) BUT:
- They become your telco. (Ironically, they have to pay MORE than the end user for leasing the copper line from KPN, which means being a telco is a slight loss for them, causing their ADSL monthly fee to increase slightly)
- They offer better call rates than KPN (esp. international)
- They offer between 2 and 8Mbit connection (although they, quite honestly, state on their website that 8Mbit is not possible unless you're actually IN the phone exchange) Friends of mine who have cistron ADSL though, get 400KByte downstream and 80KByte upstream. (4Mbit/500Kbit up/down))
- In attaining their monopoly, KPN will not reveal the location of the phone exchanges. Cistron has to guess, and deduce where they are.
So, ADSL is prevented a lot by our telco, KPN, but with the help of cistron, maybe this will all change soon (Like fixed price local calls, lower call rates, and all the other fun stuff you get when the phone company suddenly realises it's losing hold of it's monopoly)
Canth
I had an interview with one of these small hardware vendors that deal with CLECs. Apparently, their is much work to be done in tying these systems together i.e. getting the Trouble Tickets to flow through the system and it sounds like most of the companies run by the seat of their pants and hope that everything goes well and if not they may lose a few subscribers but that is acceptable since they still make thier money. Simple things like performance stats are still rather difficult as well.
These are the magic words that get things done when coordination difficulties arise with DSL providers and your RBOC.
A vendor meet is where technicians from the DSL provider (in this case, Covad) and the Bell company get together in the same place at the same time to verify that service exists (or, more usually, doesn't exist).
If you ever have trouble where Bell claims something is either installed or fixed and it actually isn't, push your DSL provider to force a vendor meet. This usually gets Bell off their butts and gets things fixed.
This is of more use during the install phase -- the original poster probably needs to do at least one round of letting the system work on things before pushing. Also, don't fear to contact Covad directly (1-800-GO-COVAD) and deal with them if it's actually a problem with the line. If you're just having IP/configuration trouble, you need to deal with your ISP, but if you actually, physically, don't have service, my experience has been that Covad is willing to talk to you and try to move things along.
Good luck,
XDG
Has anyone else had problems like this?
At my place of work, where are getting a dedicated line from MCI^H^H^H this company, which shalt remain nameless. Anyways, the higher ups pay one huge bag of money to this company for the "full-dedicated solution". The line goes down once in awhile *cough*every fucking month*cough* and I have to call this companies support engineers to get "full-dedicated tech support", which there tech support team is really good by the way, probably because they have ALOT of practice at it.
Anyways, I hear this ALOT
"Ok this is simple, just plug it in and it should work"
"So you going to plug it in"
"Hell no, are you crazy, we have to wait for the local telco techs to get here, I am not allowed to touch this line"
This one time I remember the line being down for 12+ hours, it took me my entire work day just to find and convince a support engineer that this was HIS line and HE should of been working on it.
"Have you tried calling the local telco? you should try them first"
"Uh, we got the complete package from you guys, we pay you guys and we never even talked to the local telco, your sales person said that you guys handled the local telco"
"Oh, now that is your problem there son, you listened to the sale person. You just got the block them out."
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I tried to use Flashcom for a job I was doing. It took them 6.5 months and no connection. So the people got pissed at me and dropped my contract. Flashcom is the problem. here is what they did in my area. Flashcom orders its dsl through northpoint. Northpoint hires out Bell Atlantic to do all the wiring and equip. Which then means you can get Bell Atlantic DSL (*HOW COOL IS THAT...this is the way to go*). Then...they hired some other contractor to come out and hand me an IP address. So really...all flashcom is is a billing agent. Their tech support people are morons. And...don't tell them you are using a not M$ product...or that's their excuse. If you work for flashcom and are reading this...sorry. But your company sucks!
So if you are in Pittsburgh at least...order Flashcom and they will screw you over...but eventually they will have Bell Atlantic put in the equip for you so you can switch to their service
DSL is a good thing, but wireless would be EVEN BETTER. I wait for the day when my Internet access is ubiquitous and not reliant on someone elses lines.
Ham on rye, hold the mayo please.
thelocust[dot]org
I'm shopping for DSL service right now and I've found www.dslreports.com pretty useful. If you have DSL try and leave some feedback there. It'll help those of us who are still looking. I've decided to go with PhoenixDSL after reading the page. It's a national company and the president himself goes out and investigates Quake 3 ping times and even responds to user posts about the quality of service. Can't beat that.
Because they couldn't even offer basic services, like a static IP address, I went with a third party ISP, Potomac Networks. They were able to supplement Bell Atlantic's service with a static IP and handle all my support issue much more effectively than if I had to call Bell Atlantic directly. I'm convinced that it would have taken over a month for DSL to work if I had worked directly with Bell Atlantic. My DSL ISP partner (potomac) joined me on the line when signing up with Bell Atlantic and had to correct them several times regarding how to set it up.
Of course, not all third parties are as good, but my experience has been good. I would rather use a dial up modem than use DSL direct through Bell Atlantic.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
One thing I cannot understand is people who use a non-ILEC DSL provider, get discouraged buy service, outage, etc... and then threaten to change to cable. Cable works because (at least in my area) there is one company that owns the physical cable, the digital service transmission and the ISP. Of course, if one company owns all of the parts, then problems are going to be solved more efficiently than if there are several different (competing) players involved. If you want to compare apples to apples, then get DSL from your ILEC using their ISP.
:-)
The reason I have DSL is exactly because of this competition. I currently receive the DSL service from the ILEC, while all ISP services come from a local provider. This kind of competition is simply unavailable from cable in my area. I searched ISPs, found one with a TOS and privacy policy that I could respect, and then had my ILEC simply provide a dumb digital pipe to them. With cable, there would be no choice. If AT&T wanted to ban alt.sex.with.small.furry.animals or sell my browsing habits to the highest bidders, I would be SOL. With DSL, I can always change ISPs or service providers.
I am not 100% sold on the wonders of DSL. But in my area, DSL provides flexability and choices that do not exist in cable. I'm tired of people confusing the red-tape issues involved in DSL to Cable with the physical technologies. If the FCC stuck its fingers in cable, then there would be just as many SNAFUs with getting service as there are with DSL. If DSL were unregulated and so the only choice was to use the ILECs plant, service and ISL, then DSL would be as easy as cable. It's important to recognize the issues in DSL as being corporate BS and not inherent in the technology. Of course, none of this matters to me if email has been down for 3 days and I havn't been able to get my Q3 fix
Telocity is pretty bad. Go read the reviews at http://www.dslreports.com . High ping times, slow speed, frequent outages, terrible support. I am not happy with Telocity's service, and if you follow dslreports.com and Telocity's own newsgroups you will be less than impressed.
Well, I am now into round 2 with this wonderful partnership. Last year, I ordered DSL for our office, since we got a kick-ass deal. Ordered in August, finally got the installation in December. The problems were numerous, and it's happening all over again. Back and forth, they blamed each other for not doing comething correctly. It was usually BA screwing up (a telco screwing up??? Nah!). They didn't install the loop, they didn't finish the loop, blah blah blah.
Fast forward to last week, we were scheduled to have the DSL installation complete for a second office in the same town. In fact, Covad confirmeed TWICE last week that they would deliver the router on Friday between 12 and 5. No one showed. And *no one* called to fill us in. It was nice having people wait on a holiday Friday afternoon for nothing... I call today, and "supposedly" Bell Atlantic didn't finish/install the loop (again). I called an hour ago, explained, and am now waiting for some dude to get back to me (told me he'd call in 30 minutes). I'm not expecting to hear from him until this afternoon. I know better by now. Keep in mind that we were informed TWO weeks ago that BA had done everything. Incredible.
I really wish BA would some day get their act together. I have never witnessed so much incompetence. My dad is a manager for BA and tells me horror story after horror story about how stupid these people really are. The fact is that people have been complaining in DROVES for well over a year about BA's DSL service and nothing seems to change. Don't expect it to now.....
Good lord some of you people have some messed up telco's. Here is my experiance with GTE DSL with a third party ISP.
Called GTE to order line with a connection to a different ISP. GTE rep tells me no problem and adds line to my bill. GTE then mails me a DSL self install kit. (Just a bunch of line filters)
Call the ISP (August.net) and tell them that GTE is going to give them a line for me. ISP checks their orders and sees the line and everything is fine.
4 days later I get the DSL modem and all the line filters. It takes me maybe 10 minutes to plug the filters into the phones and turn on the DSL modem. Once that is done, to my surprise I am up on the internet with the static IPs that the ISP set me up with. Turns out that GTE had turned on the DSL server about 2 seconds after I got off the phone with them and the ISP had my information ready to go.
I know it's not the same story of pain and suffering that you have all been having, but I wanted you all to know that sometimes it does work just fine. I even had a line problem after a power outage at one point and it only took 5 minutes on the phone to fix it.
I get my DSL from PACbell and the installation was painless, took about 1 hour, and I have had no down what so ever.
I checked Covad out and they said they could run me a line. I made contact with one of their ISP partners, Speakeasy, who I also highly reccomend -- they're Linux clueful and they don't seem to be overcommiting their service -- I can usually get the full speed of my line when downloading files except for a couple of sites which are slow from anywhere I've tried them.
For $200 a month I'm getting 768K both ways, and some static IP addresses. That covers the ISP and the DSL line, which is included in the ISP bill. Covad was incredibly quick to get a guy out to my house to run the line in -- I was expecting to have to wait a couple of months and they got it all turned around and on within a couple of weeks.
There is one thing you do have to watch out for, and that's the initial installation charge. Make sure you get a quote for that along with the rest of the service or you'll get a nasty surprise on the first bill. I'm used to leased prices though, so I didn't find it unreasonable.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As soon as this tech irons out some of the kinks and I don't lose my connection every week or so, I'll flip to a third party ISP as I feel you get a better response from smaller providers.
My local DSL provider is USWest and my plan was to hook up with them for both the DSL and the ISP side for all the reasons you mentioned - one contact, one bill, etc etc etc. So I called them to ask about it.. they were real keen to sell both to me, and when I asked the one Q that most ISPs waffle on "will I have a dynamic or static IP?" they came right back and said "static" so I places the order and start building myself a suitable linux firewall/router to be ready for the install date... All the hardware arrives WELL ahead of schedule and I'm starting to be impressed with these guys when they send me the setup info. Whats this? dynamic IP? on an always-on DSL line? so I'm going to have to hack my firewall to cope with lease expiry and other such lovelies? (yes I know it isnt that hard but its more hassle) and more to the point it isnt what they told me I'd get when I placed the order. So I call them only to be told that yes of course I can have it but for MUCH more money.. I'm not going to eat that cost so I guess I have little choice but I promised 'em I'd bitch about it every chance I got and since the following week /. provided a hook for me to do just that, I just did :)
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
Check this site out. They have reviews of all sorts of ISPs and DSL connects. Covad is not always at fault. I have access through CapuNet in the D.C. area and they have been great! They give me 4 static IPs, reverse DNS, and let me run any stuff I want on my end. They have great tech support and were very prompt about the install. In fact, they were one day EARLY. They piggyback on Covad equipment. Bell Atlantic couldn't even get me service when I called but CapuNet came through.
Also on the dslreports site, they really bash on Flashcom. Apparantly one of the WORST ISPs for DSL service.
BTW, I do not work for any of these companies in any way, shape, or previous incarnation.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
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
Want to hear something REALLY scary? :) I've been waiting to get my DSL working since February. I'm using Flashcom, Covad, and USWest for my service. After placing my order in February I waited about two weeks and had still heard nothing from Flashcom. I called them and found that they'd cancelled my order because my billing address for them and USWest didn't match. Because USWest had abbreviated my street name to Ceylon St and Flashcom hadn't the two addresses were different and this somehow auto-cancelled my order. In mid-April a very nice tech from Covad brought me my ISDL router and set me up. Sadly the NT1 light just keeps flashing. Apparently there is no physical line connecting my router to anything past my neighborhood. I can't call USWest to get status on the circuit ID because it's a special one for Covad and my name isn't associated with it in any way. If I call Flashcom they call Covad who says, "USWest is working on it." So all in all they've totally screwed up this installation and if that's not bad enough they somehow also screwed up my analog phone line. I can't stay connected to the internet for more than 20 seconds before the modem tries to renegociate the connection. With this going on I'm getting about a 40% packet loss percentage and usually about after five minutes I lose my connection entirely. Every time I call USWest to get a work order issued I give them an elaborate explanation of what my problem is. The sad thing is that the customer reps always translate this to "noise on line." The tech's then come out, plug in their lineman's phone, and tell me, "it sounds clear to me!" So I'm praying for @home to come to my area at this point.
Well I run a SDSL line at home and at a seperate office location. At home I am setup with a local carrier (Monmouth County, NJ) monmouth.com and I am setup with NorthPoint for the actual DSL carrier. I had initial problems with the installation that took 2 weeks to solve. There was a lot of running between the three companies, Bell Atlantic, NorthPoint, and Monmouth.com. Wound up being the router at Bell's station was not setup correctly. My local provider Monmouth.com really came through for me on this with some quick service and constant feedback. I have been offline 13 times since 4-11-00 (some of these were power problems), no time was greater then 2 hours, most being around 15 mins.
Now I also run a SDSL line with DSL.net (I think they run NorthPoint at this location to but I do not offically know this, they use the same installers as NorthPoint). First of the salesmen at DSL.net are sharks, they will promise the uneducated everything, e.g. 99.9% uptime (within their own network). The line was setup without a glitch. Within the first month it was down for one whole week, the router was deleted from the system and then for 4 more business days when someone at DSL.net decided to tell Bell's router that I was an ISDN line and not a SDSL line (no idea how that happens, but that is what the Bell repair guy said (they responded very quickly to this location since there are over 100 traditional phone lines in the building)). So all of my problems were internal to DSL.net and their customer service sucked, massive hold times (averaging 7 hours), no callbacks, no status reports and an intollerant attitude at times.
Summation: At home I am canning my SDSL line when the contract runs out, but I will move it to another location when I move if cable is not around. The DSL.net line is being replaced as I type this by a fractional T-1 line. Downtime can cost much more then the $1,000 a month difference, gotta love a guaranteed 3 hour response time.
After signing a two year contract (my fault I know), and received installation for free and a DSL modem for free. It took 4 months for the service to finally be installed. After "negotiating" from 1.2mps down to 144k, the line was finally installed, which didn't seem like a terribly difficult task.
I moved to a new apartment 5 months later, and didn't realize that it would take 3-4 months to get the service installed in a new location for $225 additional. I asked to get the fee waived for installation or I would go for a cable service instead. They (Fast Pointe Communications) said "No". So I was going to cancel the rest of my contract which I thought would cost me $250, which is only $10 more than I would pay at $80 per month over the next year. I called them and they said, "Oh, wait you would be not only paying for the remainder of the contract, but the modem that we gave you for free, and the free installation", which comes out to about $1000. I laughed at that one and they asked me what I was going to do. I plan on letting the contract go, pay the $80 a month for no service, it's the cheapest route.
What I did while all this was going on, I ordered Cable Modem Service. It was installed the next day, for $100. The service is only $30/month at 1.2mbps. I get a steady 120k down, and it works great so far.
My advice, wait until DSL is as reliable and popular as cable. They will have to increase customer satisfaction to compete realistically with cable services.
DSL was a rediculous experience, buying a new car is easier. It is almost as if Fast Point Communications does not want customers, they did nothing to help with anything!
--Evan
I'm currently using Bell Atlantic for my DSL service in Maryland, and am desperate to change providers once my 1 year commitment to them is up.
Here are a few reasons why the evil is no less when using Bell Atlantic (or another line owner):
1. It still takes them weeks to process work orders! Yes, they'll have access to updates for you, but see number 2 below.
2. HOLD TIMES!!! The Bell technician that came to do my installation waited for 3 hours on the phone to his own company just to flip a switch. The second day of installation they never showed, and so I set everything up after waiting 4 hours. Then it still didn't work so I was on hold for 3 hours just to talk to someone, then another hour while they tried to figure out why I couldn't connect, only to discover they forgot to flip a switch.
3. The Bell phone people hate the Bell DSL department! Even internally the hold times are atrocious. I actually had a Bell phone employee
censor herself as she cursed out the DSL department for 20 minutes worth of hold time (at which point she hung up) and I informed her that it would most likely take 2-3 hours of hold time. (she had an intern wait on hold on my behalf instead)
3a. The intern managed to get a hold of the manager of the DSL, explain the problem, and give him my information so he could call me. He never called, Bell phone lodged a complaint, and I got my $99 back for installation.
4. If you have technical issues (like the periodic down times, and there will be periodic down times), you have to call, and wait - see number 2.
5. THE BIGGEST REASON: They no longer give out static IP's! Instead they're using PPPOE (PPP over ethernet), which isn't nearly as compatible or easy to install.
6. Personal principle. While Bell phone may know what they're doing, Bell DSL does not. Or rather, I should say, they know Windows 95/98 but are sans knowledge when it comes to NT.
7. They're advertising too much, and overselling their bandwidth. Rumor has it that the reason they're offering so many promotions and cheap
rates is because they simply want to corner the market. I imagine that's why they can't give out IP's anymore and had to adopt the PPPOE protocol instead, just to keep up with demand.
8. I'm moving across the hall in a few months, I simply want to move my DSL within the same building. Can't happen. They're making me pay for installation ($99), pay for the new PPPOE compatible modem ($99), and sign up for another year of service. Installation!? It's just a signal splitter that I've already got! Oh, right, more switches to flip on their side.
Basically going with a non-Bell provider means they handle all the hold time, all the headaches, and while you may have to be left in the dark,
be assured that it takes the same amount of time to get something fixed if you're using Bell or someone else.
"I'm a man. I can change. If I have to. I guess." -Red Green
Unfortunately, if you get your service directly from Bell Atlantic, you will probably have as many problems as you have now. As far as I can tell, Bell Atlantic has two major weaknesses: 1) It is not in Bell Atlantic's interest to be helpful to other DSL providers that are using Bell's lines. In my experience, they do the bare minimum to meet the requirements of the law and that is it. 2) Bell Atlantic is still primarily a phone company. The company is not good at dealing with data networks. My observations stem from the six months my husband and I spent trying to get DSL service into our apartment. We decided to go with a third party provider of DSL service after watching many of our aquaintances **try** to get service from Bell Atlantic. As of a couple of months ago, Bell Atlantic would give you a DSL modem along with instructions to set it up. My husband set it up for someone with an iMac. It worked except for the minor problem that they couldn't browse. As I recall, they could get to the Bell Atlantic web site but that was it. Furthermore, following Bell's directions blew away all of the custom setup connections that had already been set up on the computer. When my husband called Bell for help, they told him that he couldn't browse because they had the wrong version of MacTCP. This explanation didn't make sense for a plethora of reasons that I won't belabor now. The point is, they couldn't solve the most basic networking issues; they have almost no Mac experience despite the popularity of iMacs; and they blamed the consumer for the problem. In this case, the consumers in question terminated their "DSL service" from Bell Atlantic that never worked, and we had to fix all of the connection set ups that Bell Atlantic had blown away. In setting up DSL at our own apartment, we had to do much of the wiring ourselves. The situation between the Bell phone techs coming out, running and tagging a second line for DSL service, and then having a Northpoint tech come out to actually get it running was difficult to say the least. The only saving grace was that the Northpoint folks were competent, considering what they were given to work with, and nice. But, it was still an incredible hassle and if we were not technical ourselves, we would never have gotten it to work. So, to sum up, I don't think there is a good DSL answer at this point, but going to Bell Atlantic is unlikely to help. It's hard to tell where the line between Bell's own incompetence and their lack of desire to be helpful to other DSL providers is, but in the end, what it spells for consumers is terrible to non-existent service. As much of a hassle as it is, I would still recommend that if you use DSL you go through a third party provider because at least a third party provider is likely to have better grasp of data networking.
What are the differences in how the technology works between the two. I understand how the Frame Relay works but am having a hardtime with the DSL.
I was informed by Ma Bell that once the copper enters the CO from my house it is routed into the switch. Once in the switch the signal is split with the analog signal being sent out over the phone network and the digital signal being routed into the DSLAM. Once it hits the DSLAM it is routed over the Internet.
Bell also said that third party DSL providers do not have their own DSLAM and have to use Bell's DSLAM which the rent ports on.
When it comes to the CLEC, the line is routed from the Bell switch to the CLEC switch where it goes through the same process.
It seems to me that Ma Bell is leaving out some of the details (in an obvious attempt to confuse me). What kind of switch is it that splits the signal AFTER it hits the switch. It seems to me that it should be split before hitting the switch.
If anyone has accurate info on the path the signal takes from DSL modem to the net, I would appreciate it.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I work for an ISP and i go through that crap all the time. If any line of any sort goes down i have to call one company who calls another company who calls a third. This "third" person doesn't care if he get the problem fixed because you are not his customer. All these rules and regulations with the phone companies is a bunch of bs. I BET SLASHDOT IS BEHIND IT!!! They want more posts on their message board so they pay off the phone companies to piss us off!
DAMN CRACKERS!
http://www.1053.org -=We use big words=-
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.
Who is the master of foxhounds, and who says the hunt has begun? -Pink Floyd
<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>
'yields false when preceded by its quotation' yields false when preceded by its quotation.
I moved over a year ago and they never changed my billing phone number. They cut service to my new home because of nonpayment, though I was paying, six months ago. They got my service back up after a week and I forgive them for their clerical error. Mistake, 'cause it happened again just three weeks ago! I was down for a week again. Here's the process: you call to complain, they don't know what to do so they transfer you, an hour later (and many transfers) you're told that the problem will be fixed in 24hrs, and last repeat the next day. If you can get a different provider, I would.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
It is supposed to be 2.2 mbit downstream, 1.1 up but I have found my max speeds to be about 140k/s both ways, with the record at 180 down. I get 1 static IP and they have no options for more
I pay 65$ CDN a month, which is 43.36$ US. If it has ever gone down, I haven't noticed. Fortunately for me they don't offer this service anymore so people can't suck up my bandwidth quite as easily. Now they sell the nortel 1 meg modem service with PPPOE which i think is 900/128kb/s i think.
My setup is still better than cable here because cable is capped at 50kbyte/s send whereas i can send at 140 which is much better for running webservers and such.
Living in the midwest here in Canada (Saskatchewan) to be exact, I feel pretty lucky as far as ADSL goes. SaskTel, our Telco, is actually pretty good, except for the tech support. I called to get the line installed and within 3 weeks had it, and that was actually a very long wait (back orders from a Christmas special). Since then, I have 1 or 2 outages, usually lasting only a few hours. This is an all in one deal, as SaskTel is the ISP and Telco. The only thing contracted out is the install, which is done through local computer companies. The installer I had was pretty good. He came out, hooked up the line, and plugged in his laptop, and had a connection. They supply a cheap NIC, but I had a 3COM in my Linux box. The tech was more than willing to wait while I setup the IP info, and tested the connection. They don't support Linux, but they don't object to it. It costs about $50 a month on top of any cost for the existing line. I live in one of the larger cities in Saskatchewan, but even a lot of our smaller communities are getting ADSL. For example, Weyburn, my home town, has ADSL. Weyburn has a population of about 10,000, and is 60 miles from the nearest city. As far as the tech support goes, there are a few who have a clue, but most don't. About two years ago, SaskTel decided to move its tech support from a third party to in-house. I was one of the consultants who was brought in to start it off while they hired (and we trained) new people. However, they couldn't attract very knowledgeable people with the salary they were offering, so they got relatively unskilled people. Luckily, I know the main System Administrator from school, as well as being in a Linux Users group with him. The only other complaint I have with SaskTel is NAT. For general surfing and gaming, no problem. However, I would like to get back to having a Linux box or two on static IP's like I did on cable modem. However, my cable was routinely (several times an evening) cutting out for 30 seconds to a minute. After months of complaining and getting things like "we're working on it" I gave up. Those kind of delays absolutely kill gaming!
If this wasn't enough, I'm still working to try to resolve the billing issues, because BellSouth and BellSouth.net keep pointing fingers at eachother.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
1. When in doubt, call tech support. Phone techs are often overworked, and rarely know all that much about what's going on. The last time I had trouble, I finally resorted to asking a tech to call Covad while I waited on the line. She did this, and within minutes my problem was resolved! If I had left it up to chance or up to the average phone tech, my dsl would still be down and I'd be typing a somewhat different message over my dialup connection.
2. If you realize that you are talking with a phone support tech who knows what's going on, ask for his or her name and write a letter to his/her boss praising her. Also, ask for this tech the next time you have trouble. Unfortunately, people of this caliber often don't work tech support jobs for long.
3. Never trust the computer generated messages that appear on an 'account status' page. If a weird message (or repeting message) is generated, call up tech support and get to the bottom of it. Never hesitate to suggest that the tech might call Covad (or appropriate provider) just to clear things up... Again, offer to wait on the line.
If I had known the above things before trying to get DSL, i would have saved hours of time on the phone and hours of frustration.
Amazing magic tricks
I couldn't even get IDSL service *installed* due to communications screwups of a really basic nature between the ISP (Internet Express), the intermediary (Covad), and the phone company (Southwestern Bell). At this point I don't care whose fault it was, I cancelled my service. When someone figures out how to provide actual customer service in this market, then I'll come back to it.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Almost everyone I have talked to about their DSL service agrees: use the phone company for the line and a high-end, local ISP for service. I chose to use USWest (the local provider in Minneapolis) to give me the line, and visi as my ISP. They have a great reputation for technical excellence and quality customer service. I have had only one outage, and the ISP called me before I even knew about the outage, just to let me know. I have had several friends who have had severe problems when their ISP is also the phone company. Mostly it amounted to overbilling, but I've also heard about major, long-term outages, outages of some services (POP and SMTP), and a lack of cool services (like the static IP my ISP throws in for free). It may just amount to my experiences, the experiences of those around me, and a general disorganization at USWest, but it seems like the formula works pretty well. I've been told by a couple of people that the nationals (concentric, flashcom) are kind of hard to deal with because they're very large and have to deal with multiple companies to complete service, but I've also heard that Covad rocks.
i have no legs.
Telco's don't give a shit about consumer service, unless they are required to by the government. In the US, the Telco must have a certain percentage of available time on Voice lines, and that is pretty high, but on DSL, there is no requirement, so if anything is going to slide its going to be the consumer services, cause they sure is hell aren't going to ask someone from the T3 group to pop over to Joe Users house and test the copper facilities. 3 weeks is a pretty average downtime for DSL, from what I've noticed. FUNFUN.
Flashcom is the absolute worst company I've ever dealt with.
I talked to them first week of January to get DSL installed. They tol dme it would take 4-6 weeks. About three weeks later I called back to check on my status. They were unable to find any record of my request (just changed databases or something). They only thing they said they could do is E-mail everyone in the office and then have whoever was my sales-rep call me up (they couldn't look up that info and I had never received E-mail from them). They never called. Two days later I called back and they told me the same thing. The third or fourth time this happened I demanded to speak to the manager. That didn't happen. I didn't get anywhere until I put the president of my company on the phone to talk to them. They said they would resubmit the request. Two weeks later I talked to them again (its been about 5 weeks so far, and no word from them). This time, with a bit of diffuculty they were able to find some record of me. I asked how progress was going and they were unable to tell me anything. Frustrated, I told them I wanted to cancel my request because it was talking so long (this was for a high-tech startup that needed a connection ASAP!). They told me that there was a $250 charge for early cancellation. I had never heard of this before and they said it was in the contract I ahd signed. I had never signed a contract! I had never even seen a contract. But I decided to give them another week. After several more calls I was finally able to get someone to help. Oddly, it was a tech support person for people who already had connections. He took my request for walked into the next room and faxed it to Covad, a process that took him 5 minutes but I had waited 6 weeks to happen. If he hadn't done that I'm sure I would still be without DSL today. That was the very _first_ step in getting DSL installed. Throughout this process they insisted that they would make the 6 week deadline that they had quoted me. It finally took them about 3 months.
So, Flashcom sucks. Their service is horrible. And their tech support is incompetent. I actually had the tech support guys asking me how to configure linux (oh, like how does ifconfig work). The one good thing about them is that they're cheap...
As a current customer of BA's Infospeed, their residential DSL service, for about a year I can advise you of this. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU GET SERVICE FROM BELL ATLANTIC.
1) Bell Atlantic's internal infrastructure is totally fragmemnted. I have dealt with well over 7 different departments and subcontracted companies to get a simple issue resolved. These departments do not communicate with each other at all.
2) Bell Atlantic DSL service goes down for weeks at a time with no info on when they will be up again, no sense of urgency will get results, they are the phone company, they don't have to care.
3) Bell Atlantic's Billing system is wrought with problems, I have one phone line and BA has over charged me since December each month (double billing) and has failed to stop the billing and failed to give me credit for the overbilling. My featureless phoneline now stands at well over $500.
4) Bell Atlantic's techsupport is staffed by upto 3 different companies in 3 different states, most of whom get paid by how many calls they take, and couldn't care less if your problem is resolved. They make you go through a moronic process of going through your system setup, on EVERY CALL. If you state you have anything but Windoze or MacOS they refuse to help. A manger actually hung up on me once when I told him I was running Linux.
5) Bell Atlantic does not offer static ip's or even DCHP, but a whacked out protocol called PPPoE, PPP over ethernet. plainly put it sucks, period...
6) If you have any problem at all Bell Atlantic uses the same 72-hour trouble ticket system that it uses for its POTS service, if you have a problem, it has 72 hours to fix the problem, if the problem is not fixed, they issue another ticket which gives them another 72 hours to fix the problem, ad nauseum...
7) Bell Atlantics Speed offerings are 640/90, 1500/90, and 7100/640 kbps. the 640/90 is a false number it is truely 608/90, and I have never seen speeds over 525kbps/70kbps (65KB/s) EVER! the numbers that are advertized are purely for marketing and are totally bogus.
8) The Upload speeds are serverly inadequet for giving optimal download speeds. When uploading at full rate the download speed is crippled to approx 250kbps as there isn't enough bandwidth left to send back the ACKs. The 1500/90 service is even more crippled, you'll never EVER get the 1500kbps download speed under any circumstances at the 70kbps upload speed isn't large enough to sustain this.
I could go on forever... Just go to dslreports.com and research your options, but please don't think that if you deal with BA exclusively you'll only be dealing with one entity. This is simply not true.
Capunet is my future DSL provider, just waiting for COVAD to hook me up up at the CO
bpd
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I was using HarvardNet in the Boston area for DSL and colocation and have fired them. They are not a reseller and claim that they sell business grade circuits and charge that way. Depending on who you talk to, their name should be "HarmlessNet" or "HarmfulNet". My experience says harmful. The experience of myself and those I've spoken too have all been similar: failure to deliver contracted for (and billed for!) service. And to paraphrase the VP of Sales: it doesn't matter if we don't deliver what we promise, we expect to be paid. Regardless of who sells you the DSL, unless they are an lec, they are getting the copper elsewhere. Since most T-1's are HDSL anyway and one company is providing IP while the other provides the circuit, you'd think that it wouldn't matter much. I've got a story that I'm writing for submission here on /. about lack of service in the age of big VC and I think these experiences pretty much describe it. My experiences with most ISP's and telco's over the last several years have all been similar but certainly the degree is different. The majority of the people dealing with customers are hired off the street, they don't cost much and aren't given any customer service training. And when you finally get someone on the phone who is knowledgeable, they generally are irritable and don't want to talk to anyone. I know a fair number of people that work for have worked at ISP's like Genuity (nee GTE Internetworking nee BBN Planet), Sprint, UUNet, CAIS, etc., in the DC and Boston areas and typically the knowledgeable ones work incredibly long hours. In the case of HarvardNet, anyone with knowledge in engineering basically was told to leave when they received gobs of venture capital (about $70 Million to date). Unfortunately, the VC wanted their own people in so that meant low salaries and people that look good in suits. Now that I went a little off topic, I'll real it in and talk about DSL. HarvardNet uses RADSL has a clean internal network in terms of ping times and traffic but has about zilch for border routers and seems to use static routes everywhere. They went through a major changeover in equipment to Cisco both for their routers and switches and their DSLAMs. At least the Paradyne DSLAMs worked in a degraded network environment(anyone who has lived with Bell Atlantic/Nynex/NE Telephone knows exactly what I mean). HarvardNet's customer care manager went so far as to state, after the switch from Paradyne to Cisco, that "Cisco had no idea what was wrong". That was about 2 1/2 weeks after the gear was replaced. No one returns calls unless you really raise hell and they act like 20% packet loss is normal unless you can roll out the industry statistics. Specifically, a circuit turned up for 784kb shouldn't routinely have the throughput of about a 19.2kb modem from a known source a couple of hops away with no load. You should see about (784/8) * 0.87 = 85kb or bandwidth in bits divided by bites * overhead in a best case scenario. But the measured bandwidth when things were working well came in at around 12 - 15 (2 B channel ISDN) and sometimes an abominable 3k, or 28.8 kb modem. And this was all within their network when ping times between hops, other than the DSLAM, of about 1 ms. I've heard a lot of this same sort of thing regarding DSL about a lot of providers. HarvardNet seems to be as bad as Flashcom. The people with good experiences with any DSL provider seems to be the ones who are lucky and everything worked when it was turned up. Since I had a rack in their colo which is where the DSL originates, it provided for greater testing ability since I could do it from both ends entirely withing their network. Which, since they were unwilling to look into it meant that I had to test it myself. Over the months I watched the number of hops actually increase and decrease overtime. That's odd since there's an ATM network between the router and remote DSLAM and the only reasons to screw with that is that its either broken or increasing capacity. That's pretty amazing since there were outages (no notification) and HarvardNet claimed ignorance of the whole thing except for one engineer who was surprised that anyone noticed. And there are something like 5 customers on the DSLAM I'm on. I was sickened that I had my girlfriend get a cable modem instead (I work from their a lot so she sees that I'm at least alive). It's uptime is vastly superior as is its performance. I don't particularly like it because it saturates easily but, hey, its $40, not $400.
My setup uses a FlowPoint 2100 ADSL router and my PC connects to it via PPPoE which is a pain in the ass. When I called up Mindspring's technical support, I had to talk to the "Reboot the machine" and "Uninstall/reinstall the software" people for a couple days before they directed me to someone with a clue. Once that happened, the process was very slow because Mindspring had to contact Covad who had to arrange an appointment with me. When the Covad guy couldn't figure it out, I had to call up the Mindspring guy again. The Mindspring guy then had to contact Covad to run some line tests and then eventually after another week sent Covad back out to my apartment. This time, the Covad guy was able to fix the problem, but it had already been three weeks since I first went offline.
Now that I was connected, I ran a couple of port scans on my machine from an outside computer, and knocked my router offline. My line came back up for about a day, but then dropped off again and as of today, I have been offline for another week and a half. This evening, I am getting a cable modem.
Surprisingly, the cable company has a monopoly on their lines, but they charge less per month than the mess known as the DSL provider. So far, they have also provided better customer service.
Long live the monopoly!
A choice of masters is not freedom
From what I've seen so far, the reliability of a DSL line depends a great deal on the provider. I understand that Flashcom has one of the worst reputations out there - there's more on that in other comments.
With one exception, everyone I've talked to that has DSL service directly from their telephone company is disappointed with it. My cable modem service through Frontier GlobalCenter was quite terrible, too, and I understand that @Home's service level is declining rapidly (although it's definitely still better than dialup).
Both of my DSL lines have been with a fairly small, local Internet provider. My first DSL line, with Rhythms as the circuit provider, had a nightmarish installation process. For example, Rhythms lied about when their technician would arrive to do inside wiring - for about three weeks. The line was very stable for a number of months, but Rhythms started having city-wide eight-hour outages, and not admitting that they knew about them until five hours in.
Right now, I'm almost done switching everything over to a new DSL line through NorthPoint. The installation went fairly smoothly, with the only installation delay being over the weekend, as they hadn't fully routed the line. It's been much more stable than the Rhythms line, so far, and my ISP says that NorthPoint tends to be much more reliable and alert than Rhythms or Covad. That seems to be true, although I haven't dealt with a Covad line.
Good luck! (I'm not affiliated with any of these companies, etc.)
As a former exec of a very large DSL provider I know a thing or two about the business. (I'd rather not say which company for reasons that will become apparent)
A few points here:
Covad & Northpoint are both hugely overloaded with orders, that's why there's usually a 3-6 month lead time for new orders.
Compound that with the asoundingly bad service of some of the telcos (Bell Atlantic is probably the worst in the nation) and things get complicated and slow. This is the reason for some of the 'Red Tape' - the telcos own the physical line, Covad & Northpoint just sell you bandwidth accross it.
As far as order or trouble ticket status - Any DSL provider with any sense can write an app to talk to the Covad system via XML (Covad's system is Vitria based) and get any kind of status the they want. Covad in turn has an EDI system connecting them up with the various telco entities. Last I knew, most telcos provided both order and trouble ticket status via EDI back to the Covad Vitria system so you provider *should* be able to get that data from Covad. (I was involved in the beta program for the Covad system - I am very familiar with their API). By the way, Northpoint is also doing the same thing with a Vitria based solution, although they're way behind Covad.
Another point here is that the DSL industry in general was/is in no way prepared to handle the demand. On top of that is the fact that *most* of these companies are scrambling to IPO and therefore the emphasis is on lines installed, not trouble tickets, not customer service.
I still have a free line with my former company that I was given when I worked there. It's still free, they forgot about me I guess. However the speed is so irregular and the outages so frequent that I recently got a cable hookup as well. We use the DSL for websites and mail and use the cable for outbound traffic and general use. Best $40US a month I've ever spent.
For ratings on the many, many DSL providers check out http://www.dslreports.com
Hope this helps
Otto
I, too, have Flashcom, and they have been nothing but one big headache. They took well over a month to get the install process going, repeatedly telling me they'd contcat me, then failing to. They haven't billed me in close to six months, and I'm fearing when that bill does come in and exceeds my credit card limit. The service has been flaky, the customer service horrific, and the speeds mediocre. The only reason I went with Flashcom is that they gave me multiple dedicated IP's. As soon as I get IP masquerading setup properly at home, I am going to drop flashcom like a bad habit and get Bell Atlantic, which from friends' accounts is much better to deal with.
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
My company has business DSL with Concentric.
We had a 12 hour (!) outage in Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, I really can't blame Concentric for it, since they go through Covad and it appears to have been Covad's fault. Of course this is no real consolation since virtually everyone goes with Covad.
Anyone have experience with Northpoint?
D
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Flashcom consistently screwed up my DSL service. There were numerous problems with custom DNS and reverse DNS entries. The worst problem ever was when they changed all their IP address ranges because they lost their IANA lease. One day all my static IP addresses were non-functional and all my servers (including name servers) were rendered useless. Like I said, I will never give Flashcom my business again and I will tell my horror stories so that others can avoid them as well.
I called them, I signed up with them, and two days later I got an emailed offer for free equipment and no setup fee.
Of course by then I'd already agreed to pay for my equipment and the setup fee, so I feel a bit used. Moral is that if you're not in a total hurry where days matter, wait a couple of days between expressing interest and actually placing your order to get a better deal.
They do seem to offer pretty good customer service, though, although I'm underwhelmed by the speed of my iDSL connection (see my other comments).
D
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In Canada (or perhaps just where I live in BC) things get kinda ugly with DSL. Here goes.....
1. Installation via the local phone company costs a direct $50 Canadian. Installation via an ISP costs $150, $50 of which goes to the local phone carrier, $65 of which goes to the people kind enough to set this up, and $35 goes to the ISP. Supreme rip off right here on the ISP end due to CRTC regulations.
2. Local phone carriers offer a cap on how much bandwidth I may use in total per month (though don't appear to actually cap you, they only state this in their policy). ISP's however allow users only 2GB of bandwidth per month, charge $20 per GB after this ($7 of which goes to the phone company, $13 of which goes to the ISP). Another reason to go directly through the phone company.
3. Here's an plus for the ISP... Local phone companies do not offer Reverse DNS or Static IP's. ISP's in my area will generally do this for me without hassle or question, and will often even handle Forward DNS no problem. It may often be cheaper to recieve more IP Addresses as well at an ISP level.
4. If my service goes down at an ISP level, the ISP will have to open a ticket with the phone company, often leaving the customer high and dry, thinking the problem is at the ISP level. This has left many customers in my area very dissatisfied with ADSL ISP's around here, when in fact it is just bad service on the phone carrier level.
5. It appears the DSLAM's in my area do not support all brands of ADSL routers... This appears to have been a way to get only certain brands of ASDL routers (e.g. USR HomeConnect) monopolized in my area, while we cannot use Cisco 67x routers due to their chipset. I personally like controlling SNMP and syslogd on my router without having to break into a router that has been leased to me by the ISP or phone company.
6. Local ISP's get first dibs on all available circuits in your area. ISP's get whatever remains on a 3 month cycle, all due to CRTC regulations. This means that the phone company never tells us there are ports available immediately, and instead puts us on a 'waiting list'. I have heard of people complaining about this to get activated immediately.
My overall impression? Go with the phone company for ADSL access, though small businesses and power users will like ISP's simply for Reverse DNS and Static IP's (which is the only thing making me scratch my head).
eraseme
FWIW, The fewest problems any of my friends have had have been with mindspring adsl in miami.
aem
-a.e.mossberg
I ordered DSL on January 12. I finally got it working May 12. Everything that could have gone wrong, did. It's was quite amazing, and after the fourth month I became determined that hell was not going to freeze over before I got my damn link.
The original install date was 5 weeks after my order was placed. fine. I am in So Cal, and everyone and their dog spot wants DSL. Pac Bell shows up 2 days early to verify the line. The D-mark (it you want DSL, you MUST know where your D-mark is) is in my garage so I need to be home for any work to be done on the line. Thankfully I was home when Pac Bell showed up early. They verified the line, all was good, and the next day I got a e-mail from Covad saying Pac Bell would be there the next day. Whatever.
Covad shows up on the appropriate day to verify the inside wiring, and hook up the modem. I turned OFF my Linux box, so they wouldn't freak out and say they don't support that. Advice to others - take no chances with the install people. Covad hooks up the modem and installs some cables, and viola, no link. damn.
He goes off to the Central Office and I never hear from him again. Next day I call Qwest (ISP) to find out what the deal is. The e-mail Covad my question and cc: me. Now I have my Qwest tracking number and Covad tracking number. These are very very important numbers, I used them often.
Every day for the next month I call Covad with my tracking number to find out any progress. I managed to escalate my trouble ticket to "Red" status. Only ISP's can do this, but since I had all my tracking numbers and was always very nice to people on the phone, they hooked me up. I also got the direct line for the So Cal dispatch for Covad. I started to call them directly to schedule appts. Covad comes out three more times and Pac Bell comes out twice more, and they blame each other for the lack on link. One of the Covad installers checks the wrong box on his form, and cancels my order. dammit, beavis. I found this out the next time I call Covad, and they tell me my order was cancelled and only an ISP can re-instated it.
So I fire off an e-mail to everyone from Pac Bell, Covad and Qwest who every sent me anything - about 15 names total. Looks like one of them was a supervisor, because I got an appointment scheduled quickly (but no order new order # for Covad)
Time for a vendor meet.
Scheduling conflicts all around, and another month passes by. Finally, the day of the vendor meet in is early May. Klaus from Covad shows up early to inspect inside wiring and the modem. Turned out the modem has been fried due to Pac Bells testing. Klaus tells me he is in charge of Covad's LA installs and only get involved on the 3rd attempt, and 75% of the installs go without a hitch. The other 25% are pure hell. He also blames the breakup for AT&T for all their current problems, and mutters something about poor documentation, equipment installed improperly, or not at all. Klaus hates pre breakup AT&T. Klaus also configured my modem improperly.
Pac Bell changes the appt. to later in the day and Klaus has to leave, but he sends one of his proteges out to make sure it all works. He and the Pac Bell guy spend all day here and at the central office upgrading equipment. Two days later I have link. wow.
One last problem, the info I originally got from Qwest with my ISP addresses, subnet, etc was wrong, so two more days on the phone to Qwest I finally get the correct info, reconfigure my modem and now it all works.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
I ordered my DSL from the Flashcom->Covad->BA trio in September. After 3 "vendor meets" during which I had to take 3 days off from work the Bell Atlantic rep failed to show up. It's May and I still have a non-working DSL modem that collects dust. Neither Flashcom nor Covad bother to call me any longer. It's a good thing that I was able to get a working cable modem on the first try. You can file a complaint with the Public Service Commission but if you search their online DB you'll see that there are already a ton of complaints. My advice is call Covad directly since Flashcom is useless. It's a shame that Bell Atlantic won't even talk to you. I've even tried to call BA's executive office of appeals and they would not even speak with me......
My experience with BellAtlantic has been a bit different - it has been far worse. They have done very little right so far.
When I signed up for their Infospeed service they sent me the wrong DSL modem and they charged me for it _6_ separate times. They did send me a replacement modem without much of a problem, but it took me over half a year of constant calling to get them to take back the original modem and get a refund for the 5 erroneous charges.
Then, on the day that my DSL line was installed and my service enabled, it worked fine while the technician was there but it stopped working about 15 minutes after he left. For the next two months it would work for maybe 5 or 10 minutes and then cut out for 15 minutes or more. It would either cut out completely or drop so many packets that it was unusable. I reported the problem immediately and despite their assurance that they would handle it within "72 hours" it took them 2 months before it was fixed, and I had to constantly hound them on the phone before they actually did anything - I got no response at all from them otherwise.
And the way they fixed my problem just shocked me. I was having the same problem that other people were reporting on the same "tree" as me, a tree being a group of a couple hundred phone lines connected at their central office. What they did was physically switch my line to a different tree. So they left a couple hundred other customers with defective connections and switched off those who figured out something was wrong rather than fixing the root of the problem.
The physical line switching also screwed up my long distance service. They didn't properly switch over my long distance phone service when they switched the line so AT&T had two accounts they were billing me for and the "newer" account that was actually being billed for my newer calls was billed at twice the rate it should have been because the appropriate calling plan wasn't in place.
Then, earlier this year my DSL went down again. This time it wasn't just phasing in and out - it was completely down. I called it in immediately and then waited 72 hours (which is how long they always say it will take), and called back only to be told that they didn't have a trouble ticket in for me. Well, I wasn't about to go through a two month ordeal again so I started calling them on a daily basis even though they would tell me each time to check back in 72 hours. It took them 10 days to fix it this time which is still waaaaaaaaay too long. I suspect the problem was something trivial like somebody had accidentally kicked the cord out of my card at the office (they said this happens a lot) - it's pathetic that it took them so long to fix it if that was the case.
To top it all off, their whole customer service process is an absolute nightmare. I was on hold for literally hours most days and when I did eventually get to speak with someone they would make me run through the same stupid ping test that I had already done a million times before and then tell me to wait 72 hours. To make matters worse, a lot of their tech support team didn't know what they were doing. I remember one tech support guy who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I said a large number of packets were being dropped.
Well, I don't have time to expand on this any further, but believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wish Cablevision would get their act together and offer cable modem service so I don't have to deal with BellAtlantic again in September when I move, but I fear that my only alternative is going to be to use a regular dial up account. I have been dreading moving for the sole fact that I will need to deal with BellAtlantic again.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I have DSL - 765kbps up & down - at quite a reasonable price from a third-party provider in Seattle. Installation took ten weeks because my ISP deals with Covad, and Covad deals with USWest - i too was thrice removed from the actual service provider.
I also don't have a ground phone - just a cell phone - and USWest indexes their work orders by phone number. My lack of a (ground) phone number meant that they had no idea who I was or where I lived.
Getting DSL was hell -- but now that I have it, life with multiple static IPs is just peachy.
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software engineer, geek grrl, fresh air junkie
Covad was pretty good - the RBOC sucked -
...).
- it was really Bell Atlantic (BA) who f'ed the whole thing up so badly; BA showed up at my place 3 different times and did jack doink (besides work really hard to figure out why they *shouldn't/couldn't* complete the install).
This is why I didn't hold the ISP fully accountable for a few months. But finally I cancelled. A few weeks after that, BA showed up to work, and I let them. They installed a second line. Then Covad came and I let them finish.
Since then, I've been running at 300+KBps up and down...and this on a service I'd CANCELLED (i'm experimenting now to see when they'll start billing me
No! No! No!
We do NOT need more government legislation. If there are examples of outright fraud, there are already civil and criminal remedies available. If it's not fraud, but just bad service, then negative PR, compalining, trashing their company reputation, (with reasoned examples and evidence), boycotts, etc. are available.
Do not EVER suggest additional government regulations, in areas where there are already means for redress. Commerce is one such area. Giving legislators an excuse to write more laws is like giving a crack addict a gift certificate to 'Crack Pipes r Us'.
--
Look at http://www.dslreports.com for the definition. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I tried to get DSL into my apartment. Because US West will not share their voice lines with Covad (even though by law they must) I had to have a second copper pair for the DSL line. The installation stalled on that copper pair - a "facilities issue" the phone company likes to call it. There was not a free copper pair from my apartment to the telephone pole. US West swore that there was no way that they could install another copper pair. Even though I could almost reach out my window and touch the telephone pole, they said that it was a big job, digging and everything and that it would never happen. After three months, US West finally canceled the order.
The other day, just to see what would happen, I ordered a second voice line. The operator did say that there was no extra copper pair, which I already knews, but that there would be no problem. He gave me an appointment for them to install the second copper pair on Friday. As soon as the second phone line works, I'm going to disconnect the line and reorder DSL with Covad, through speakeasy.net.
This kind of thing reminds me of Lilly Tomlin's skit that appeared on Saturday Night Live so often in the 70s. It was true then and it's still true. "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
I signed up with Flashcom about six months. Here, near Chicago, when you sign up with Flashcom, Covads leases the lines that Ameritech owns. Let me say right off the bat that dealing with Flashcom's reps was great. They were very nice, very sympathetic, and very knowledgable. They are also between a rock and a hard place. Everything was cool at first. They told me that it would take about 4 weeks to get out and do the install and that it would take two trips: on the first, Ameritech had to come out and light up the second set of wires, on the second, Covads comes out and finishes the connection from Ameritech's circuit to my condo. Well, Ameritech came out and did their thing, then a few days later Covads came out to finish. I live in a 13 story building with around 280 unit. It took Covads 4 hours to figure out that Ameritech activated the wrong circuit and that one of my neighbors actually had the line with my DSL tone. SO, they had to file a work order with Flashcom, who in turn had to file it Ameritech... the local phone company who was rolling out their own DSL service in six months. Obviously they wouldn't be in any hurry to give a potentil customer to Flashcom. It took them TWO MONTHS to SCHEDULE a service call to fix their mistake. Ironicly, the week they were supposed to come out and fix the line, Mediaone finished wiring our building for digital services :) I had a cable modem installed three days before Ameritech was due to arrive. I don't blame Flashcom or Covads for the problems, but I do think that they're stupid to run a highly service oriented business while allowing themselves to be at the mercy of the local phone company who has NO vested interest in seeing them succeed... Chris
I wrote this up on my website at http://www.half-truth.com/uswest if you'd care to read about it in detail.
dijit-at-half-truth.com
From dslreports.com
IDSL is DSL at 144 kbps. IDSL uses ISDN transmission coding, bunding together both ISDN channels and voice all on one circuit. IDSL does not use any kind of dial up nor involve per-call fees. For those that live too far for regular DSL, IDSL may be the only DSL option. IDSL tends to be priced at a rather higher rate per bit of speed, than any regular DSL. IDSL can still be a very satisfactory solution for data transmission compared to the alternatives (modem), coping very well with online gaming, and medium quality streaming audio/video.
Pretty much sums up what I said, with my comment on price/value added.
I was amazed to find out that the Colorado Public Utilities Commission would not and could not help me. I couldn't even file a complaint. It seems that since I am a customer of speakeasy.net and they are a customer of Covad and Covad is a customer of US West, that only Covad can complain to the Comission. Of course, the last thing that Covad wants is an even worse relationship with US West so they don't complain.
Same thing happens all over the country. The local phone companies do have an unfair advantage when it comes to DSL lines. I don't know how it is on the East Coast, but here in California, PacBell requires third party installations of DSL to install a second, separate line ($$ for PB), whereas when PB does it, they install it over your main line. To combat this, a lot of the 3rd parties offer better services. PB's services max out at 128kbps upstream (unless you want to pay almost $200/month), and your upstream and downstream aren't separate (you can't do both simultaneously). I used to have DSL through Covad/Internet Express and for $80/month got 768kbps down and 384 kbps up...simultaneously. I loved it. Unfortunately I moved, and at my new place PB told my ISP they'd have to do some trenching ($100/hour) for DSL unless I went with PB over my main line. So now I have cable...and it's pretty good...I miss having a steady speed all the time, but its better than dealing with the local phone thugs.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
Damn all monopolies! Die, PacBell, die! Die, Microsoft, die! Die die die 666 fornicate die.
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
I realize at least now I have about 100% reliable dial-up 24/7 access at 56K.
I seond this review... I've hooked up myself @IDSL speeds) and and 5 others to Megapath in the last 5 months, and the experience has been AMAZING.
They are top notch, kick-ass, etc. WE're talking low pings for your Quake3/Counterstrike/Tribes games, regional peering points into the net. (So if you live in chicago, then your data hits a chicago router first, not going out to SiLi Valley)
I've had ONE outage in 4 months on my own line.. It lasted 15 minutes. I called, and was on hold for aobut 30secs, adn they told me it was regional, it would be fixed asap.
Plus Megapath has the scret bonus of No contract. Thats right, other dsl provs. makes you sign up for one year, and charge you $200-$500 is you bail out early. Megapath is Month to month.. No early disconnect fees etc.
The only negative is that when you get their DSL service, you have to buy the router. But not from them! They will tell you whichi model to get, and you can go to Ebay/Shopper.com to buy it.
Megapath is good.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
I don't know if anyone will get to readin this, but here it goes:
I am out here in Oregon, and we have had problems with US West. The first problem, I concluded, was the Intel 2100 modem they provided. We managed to get that replaced with another one, which worked fine.
About a month ago, we started having problems connecting. We called tech support with US West, and they first said they would call back within 24 hours. We called them a couple of days later, and they said they would call back 4 hours later. We called them again, and the guy admitted that what was said to us was standard procedure, and they had 50 guys doing this who were overworked.
Finally, we found out that at some point we got moved to being 22,000 (roughly 4 miles) feet from where we are connecting to. By that measurement, we aren't supposed to even have service! They aren't supposed to connect anyone over 20,000 feet or so. The kicker is that using those yahoo maps, I found out that we are 2.4 miles from the physical building. So the line we need to use to connect is strung all over the place before it reaches us! I am telling you, it stinks.
that's demarc, short for demarcation, ie, the boundary between their stuff and yours...
His personal testimonial, particularly the long version, makes for a good read.
There are also some resources for NY area DSL sufferers. I'm not one, so I don't know if they're useful.
Around midnight the evening before the installation, he received a brief, cryptic e-mail informing him that the work order had been postponed. Never mind the fact that the e-mail gave no explanation of why the order had been cancelled with less than 8 hours notice, and that the company didn't have the courtesy to at least have a live human being call to reschedule and apologize.
After making a number of angry phone calls, he discovered that the order had been cancelled by Bell Atlantic -- the final part in the chain, and that because Flashcom could only deal with Covad, and only Covad could call Bell Atlantic, nobody could give him any concrete information about what had went wrong and how to prevent the same mistake from happening in the future. His DSL line finally got installed around late November, over 3 months after he had ordered it!
To be fair, there's probably not much that Flashcom can do about it since they also need to go through two other companies. Also, since the line's installation, it has behaved almost perfectly and with only very brief periods of down time. In fact, Flashcom even has an IRC channel where one can get updates about bad network connectivity. The one time I tried using the channel, a tech responded almost instantly.
The big bottleneck here appears to be somewhere between Bell Atlantic and Covad, where I doubt there's any impetus to improve things unless Flashcom makes complaints to a "higher authority." Since they're most certainly going to lose customers if this continues to occur, I'm sure that the people at Flashcom are well aware of the situation.
I work for a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier). We are supposed to be in competition with the big bells (Pac Bell, Bell Atlantic, etc). We run into this issue every day. We own millions of dollars worth of equipment but have to depend on many different companies for the copper to customer sites. Honestly this is not competetive. I am still waiting for a company that will be a true CLEC that will provide copper to customer sites...
I had DSL for 6 months with no problems.. Then it just stopped working. I called, and got "were experiencing problems in your area, they'll get you back on.." Long story short 4 phone calls and 2.5 weeks later I was back on. It was frustrating, but after my status was "elevated" they did call me a couple times (once at 11 pm..) Then I got billed for a full month. I had to call them to get that taken care of..
No problems since.
I think with DSL you have to hope nothing goes wrong...
When I first had PacBell DSL installed on my phone line, I experienced the same sort of thing you experienced, but internally within PacBell. Turns out their Internet division is separate from their phone division, and the DSL provisioning group is a subgroup within their phone service group. I got the impression they didn't let their DSL provisioning group within 100 feet of their Internet group at any time, even if there was pizza involved.
To make a long story short, I experienced several delays, and even misplaced work orders, in part because of the segregation between divisions. And while FlashDSL and Bell Atlantic may be worse at communicating with eachother than PacBell's internal divisions were, I suspect switching to the phone company's own DSL provider may not fix this communications issue much.
Note that I'm not faulting PacBell or large bureaucracies; I suspect the separation between divisions is largely a legal construct to prevent PacBell from getting into legal hot water with the various third party DSL Internet providers...
"I spent a week just having them go through the red tape of contacting one company, having them issue a work order with another company, then having the second company issue a work order with the third company, making me three times removed from the problem."
Sounds like a story for www.verizonREALLYsucks.com.
Ace
I was trying to get a 1.1mbps SDSL line, and was told be flashcom, AND covad that i was close enough to get this. However, when covad came out to test the phone loop, and check everything, i wasn't even eligible to get 1/10th of the speed. (Very discouraging to say the least) As it was, they said they would call my phone company, Ameritech and see if the could do something with the phone lines. After about a month went by with no calls back, i finally called flashcom who had no idea what was happening, and told me to check with covad. Called covad, and the same thing, they had no clue what was going on. Called Ameritech, and i just got into the "never ending loop" where you just get transfered from 1 person to another to another, and no one knows what the heck is happening or going on, or what you are even talking about! I finally gave up, and cancelled my order because of it. Just doing co-location now for my company instead of hosting it in my bedroom :) figured it might be a better way.
I have Flashcom and I am in GTE's area. When ever there has been a problem, I have had 3 in a year, Flashcom tech has been right on it. Even when it was a line problem, they where able to pass onto the ETA the got from gte. I am thinking that you're phone company may be less then cooperative with Flashcom. Or flashcoms growth is starting to impact its tech support.
All in All would rather be using Flashcom DSL then Time Warner Cable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Disclaimer: I work for a national '3rd party' DSL provider.
I used to have DSL through USWest, my local Telco.
I have since switched to having DSl provided by the company I work for in conjunction with Covad.
My dsl is much more reliable than it ever was with USWest, as well as faster overall.
My experience with USWest as a phone company has never in a million years given me the confidence that they have any idea what they're talking about most of the time. At least not the people on the phone, and that is what matters. I even talked to one guy there who knew a little about DSL, but he agreed with me that USWest DSL sucked!
So here's the deal. My experience with the Telco is that they really don't know what they're doing when it comes to dsl. I mean really, they didn't start their business to work with providing high speed internet access to their customers.
However, CLECS (like Covad) are in the business for just that. I have more confidence in their ability to fully understand the technology as well as understand their customers' needs because of that.
The demand is there, so Telco's provide DSL. And they don't like competition, so they make it hard for people to get DSL through another company. Very hard. Because eventually people (like the person who asked the question) will say 'scew going through these other companies, i'll go direct to the source'.
Only the thing is, its not like you're going directly to the source. The process is so involved. Even if you go through your Telco, you are going to have outages. Because even the Telco uses equipment that belongs to someone else.
Its not exactly like Flashcom and Covad are just reselling the dsl. Not at all. The only thing they are using from your Telco is the copper lines. So the Telco has the wire. Then Covad provides the network infrastructure. They're not just buying dsl and selling it to you as the middle man.
Don't go with the Telco. You'll probably regret it.
The "phone company" ISP might not be much better. I've worked for the "phone company" ISP up here in the north west, doing tech support. Due to conserns about unfair business advantage and fears of being sued, we had to go through the same stuff every other ISP did when dealing with DSL. Including having to call them to find out if they were having line trouble in an area and dealing with work orders going back and forth.
no
The DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexer) is the box in the CO that handles your line and forwards your packets to a DSL carrier's ATM switch or router. It may be owned by the Telco (aka ILEC, Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier), or by a CLEC (Competitive LEC) like Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, or Jato. In the middle of Silicon Valley, there are probably multiple carriers' DSLAMs; in Buffalo Wyoming there probably aren't any. The DSL carrier has some kind of regional concentration network, usually ATM, and connects a feed to whatever ISPs want to buy one. Some carriers, like Covad, have national ATM networks, so an ISP can connect to any Covad DSLAM in the US, probably for a higher price and somewhat higher latency than a local connection. The ISP is responsible for providing the router, IP address space, and most customer support; the ISP is a customer of the DSL carrier, who is a customer of the telco that owns the wire to your house.
Distance to the CO determines what DSL protocols and speeds can be used. For SDSL (the symmetric stuff), you can get about 12000 feet at 768kbps, and 18000 feet at 384kbps. If you want to go a long distance, IDSL uses ISDN electrical formats on the wire, but connects to a DSLAM for full-time packet service instead of connecting to a phone switch for ISDN telephone calls, and it gets smoething like 24000-30000 feet at 144kbps. These distances are equivalent wire lengths - that's how long the wire really is, adjusted for wire quality, and you can't get decent performance if you exceed the lengths. The telco can't always tell how far away you are - my house is supposed to be 11000 feet from the CO, but once when I had phone trouble, they did some tests that suggested it might be 16000, and later when I got DSL service, we gave up on getting 768kbps to work and used 384kbps.
Many of the telcos, such as Pac Bell, also provide DSLAMs and IP service. It's theoretically more likely to be successful than separate carriers, though there are mixed opinions about how well it works in practice (the negative opinions aer usually louder.) Also, ADSL makes it possible to use one pair of copper to carry both a voice circuit and an ADSL circuit, using splitters at the house. This is a big win for provisioning speed, because you can use the customer's existing phone wire pair, rather than installing a new one. It's mostly supported for Telco-provided DSL, though the telcos are supposed to let the CLECs also offer it in most territories, and it'll gradually become available in practice.
Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, which sells DSL service for businesses and consumers. Last year, when we were starting to offer DSL service, I volunteered to be a guinea pig beta user. Pac Bell owns the wires, Covad did the DSLAMs, and AT&T did the ISP portion. It worked quite nicely - installation took a bit longer than it should because I'm in a condo (inside wiring was fun) and because I was the first DSL customer on the ATM switch supporting my DSLAM (extra hour getting it configured correctly) and because my telephone line was either longer or noisier than PacBell told Covad it would be. The Flowpoint router worked well, and has a built-in hub. At the time we started our service, we only supported the business-priced Covad service and not the consumer-priced service, so when the beta period was over and they figured out how to bill me (:-), I disconnected it -- 384kbps is nice, but $180 was a bit much for home use. We've now got several reasonably-priced consumer offers (either 384 SDSL or 608/128 ADSL for $59), but cable modem service is supposed to finally be available in my town now (after 1.5 years of promising it Real Soon), and it gives me a better inside wiring setup.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lily Tomlin was correct. They're the phone company, they don't have to care. Here's why. Covad/Northpoint/Whomever pays the ILEC - be it Bell Atlantic, US West, PacBell, whatever - a grand total of around $7 a month for each copper pair used for DSL. This doesn't precisely make the telco wanna jump when your circuit goes down.
From the DSL Provider side, an interesting statistic from Covad that we finally managed to get out of them - AFTER we threatened to leave for another Provider - is that overall, 85% of the calls that they recieve from their ISP partners are a No Trouble Found call. This means that some total twit on the ISP's front line gets a call saying that a DSL line doesn't work, doesn't bother to have the router or DSL modem powercycled, and doesn't bother to check if all the cables are seated properly before they turn around and call the DSL provider to have them troubleshoot. So when you have a legitimate line issue, like an open in your circuit, it's got to get through the 85% noise before it's considered an actual signal problem. There are a few ISPs that don't do that. We actually have a 5% No Trouble Found ratio with Covad. I don't know who the worst offenders are on this, but I DO know that Concentric is one of them.
RBOCs are LAZY. Good example? We deal with mostly East Coast customers. Bell Atlantic's repair department is open Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm. Which means that if your DSL line goes down late Friday afternoon, and it's because of a break in the circuit halfway between you and the CO, you don't have a prayer of getting it fixed until probably Tuesday. And Bell Atlantic's techs are notorious for exerting themselves to find out why they aren't the problem.
Outages. DSL is highly outage-prone because in a lot of ways it still is in a Beta phase. The 12-hour outage that someone mentioned in Los Angeles I happen to know involved a massive conference call with Covad's switch and telco vendors, their entire Network Operations department, and about half of the Senior VPs in the company in an effort to get this fixed. Our company had been through something similar prior to that, and I know for a fact that they were working their butts off to get it back up and running. They then went through their network and made VERY sure that it wouldn't happen again. But new hardware fails. you take it as it goes.
ISPs tend to be lazy on the front lines, so you may have to push hard to get results. Remember that these front line techs could be handling everything from dialup to T1, so they're busy as hell with people wanting to get their pr0n. If you've got a commercial circuit, make sure your ISP has a commercial support department.
DSL IS NOT AN INTELLIGENT CHOICE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SERVICES!!!!! I cannot count the number of people who go with a DSL line to save a lot of money when they set up their e-commerce webserver and then scream about losing hundreds and thousands of dollars an hour because their DSL line is down. If you absolutely, positively MUST be connected 24/7 and need a high speed connection, get a T1. Oh. And don't use DSL to back up DSL. If one goes down, so will the other 99% of the time. It's just a waste of money.
I hope that someone gets something out of this, and actually manages to avoid a fatal mistake. As a further note, when you've got a solid DSL line, it's worth it's weight in gold. I've got a 1.5/384 Rate Adaptive line - what people were talking about when they mentioned the Commited Information Rate - through Speakeasy.net, and I've had only one problem with it, caused by a regional outage with Covad. Enjoy!
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
I've been working with a number of DSL providers. I can tell you from first hand exerience that Flashcom bites. They are already a month late on installing our line. The line is sorta in and the modem in our premise, but the basic problem is that nobody on their end can figure out how to get it to work.
Don't switch to a cable modem!
:)
Some branches of @Home (known as @Homo in many IRC channels) are very anal when it comes to running any type of "server"; I have a friend whose connection was temporarily dropped because he was running identd (which, ironically, is required to get onto irc2.home.com - @Home's EFnet IRC server!)
BTW, this may sound like flamebait but if it does I didn't mean it to.
It took FOUR MONTHS for an appointment to get set up... FOUR MONTHS! Jesus... I knew I was in for trouble then.
What happens next? GTE doesn't show up to examine the box outside. And I heard NOTHING from Covad OR GTE about the problem. I proceeded to scream at my ISP, who proceeded to scream at Covad, who proceeded to scream at GTE. Or so I thought.
The next week, while I was STILL waiting to find out why the hell the line wasn't installed... COVAD CANCELED THEIR CONTRACT WITH MY ISP, AND EVERY OTHER SMALL LOCAL ISP! Everyone who went through my ISP for Covad DSL would have their service terminated in six weeks.
How nice of Covad. Bastards.
Luckily, I'm in the process of securing a job out of state, in an area where I KNOW that I can get DSL.. or at least a cable modem. Anything that doesn't tie up my phone line.
My guy handled NYC and the surrounding area. And there were a couple others in his department on LI. I suggest causing enough of a ruckus at Flashcom to get your Covad ticket number, then deal with Covad directly. It's not perfect, but it get's one player out of the loop.
Now, somewhat stupidly, I'm trying to get a second DSL line, this time via Northpoint. Try scheduling an install date (or having them call you first).....
I really think in practice the third-party DSL stuff is a really bad idea. In theory it simplifies the DSL process, you call one company to order your DSL and they find out about service in your area. Too bad it doesn't work that way. Here PacBell is offering their own DSL service but then Earthlink (my ISP) is also offering it through a partnership with PacBell. I figured I would go with Earthlink's service even though it was 10$ more because I wouldn't have to switch email addresses and all of those hassles. According to Earthlink my house is out of range of DSL. I called up PacBell to find out when it would be available here (of course Earthlink had no idea) and they told me it was available and asked if I wanted to sign up with them. This is happening to most of the people here. Does anyone find that disturbing? We're a bunch of geeks and technophiles, what about Ma and Pa Average who just want a speedier connection because they just found out about MP3s or are tired of waiting for paged to load on their 28.8 modem? Cable here is the same way, Charter provides the copper but Earthlink hooks Charter's office to the rest of the internet. It's a real hassle trying to get support for that kind of service. I needed Mac software because my cable line needs to use a dialup connection for upstream traffic and Macs don't like doing that with their default TCP drivers. Neither Charter nor Earthlink would provide the free software to do that, they wanted me to pay for SurfDoubler out of my own pocket. If you even mention Linux support they laugh at you or ask you why you don't use Windows. I used to think service companies existed to provide service for paying customers. I no longer have such a naieve view, service companies exist to take your money and make you waste time on the telephone.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I have worked with DSL from the ISP side of things for almost two years now. One thing to realize is that there is always a tiered approach in any type of high speed, leased-line access technology. There will always be the need for a) the physical media (i.e. copper pair), b) access (a.k.a last-mile) technology such as DSL or T-1 and c) IP services on top of that.
The nature of this relationship is not the culprit when it comes to poor or delayed service with DSL. The same relationship is there with T-1 or Frame services that you would get from such companies as MCI. However, the difference is the amount of money involved for the telcos. One of the reasons that DSL is less expensive than older technologies are the service contracts developed between CLECs and ILECs. With certain companies, I am told that the guaranteed turn around is 24 hours. However, when dealing with T-1 lines, I have been able to get commitment times of less than 3 or 4 hours. However, you are usually paying at least 3 or 4 times as much for the T-1 service.
However, a lot of issues can be resolved without the need to get someone from your local telco out to the site but when there is that need, be in for a wait. If you are truly looking at doing mission critical applications over DSL, you better make sure that you have redunancy built into your network architecture so that you are not screwed by a single line outage.
One final word on this is that, in spite of the limitations of the telco industry and service level agreements, it is your ISPs responsibility to service you and some are better at it than others. If you find that you get consistantly poor service from your provider, you may want to switch.
Sometimes distance isn't the problem. I live in Northern Virginia and can't get broadband access anywhere (yet). My cable provider is slated for winter 2000 and I live 14000 feet from the central office. Now that's within the theoretical limits, but I cannot get ONE provider to even attempt a lower rate SDSL/ADSL connection. My guess is that unless you're a slam dunk, you don't even get looked at. At one point, I found a third party provider (Phoenix) who contracted to 208Kbps SDSL, but later told me that only IDSL was available. I guess theory is fine as long as it doesn't create more work for the provider. Hmmm.
Absolutly, As a Consultant reseller of service, i am not an ISP, but my clients always call me first. Then i have to call the ISP, they contact Covad, Covad Contacts Bell Atalantic, In this case, the end user is 5th in line and there is nothing i can do for them. Covad has become too big to handle the load of customers they have and their service is getting worse and worse (took 8 days to get the clients DSL back up...11 people without access for 8 days....can you image anything worse?) bob@rke.net
I totally agree that these new service oriented companies are disasters. However, any government regulation is going to have to well thought out and carefully crafted, and the same people that passed the DMCA are unlikely to figure out how to do it. I would suggest that you will have better reform results by focusing on tape recording (with notice) phone calls with salesman and customer support, and then making well documented compliants when they don't follow through. If you feel you are ignored, you should forward all of your documentation to your state's attorney general and consider direct legal action such as small claims court. Your local TV station might broadcast a story on a well documented case of abuse.
The panacea of "we'll get a law" rarely pays off, especially when the problem is as ill-defined as simply bad business practices by a certain ill-defined class of companies.
I think the real problem is that we put up with it, especially here in America. How many people actually sit down and carefully read their long distence phone bill ? A large portion of those $1.54 "connection fees" and "access fees" are simply illegal; if you refuse to pay them and write enough letters, they eventually disappear from your bill. I suspect it will take something like a major depression to make Americans start complaining and fighting these types of abuses.
My experience with phone company's incompetance or fraud (couldn't figure out which) lead me to rely on pre-paid celluar deals for communication -- I always pay in cash, and make sure they never get my name or credit card number. It's more expensive than the other deals, but I suspect all the minor little surprises in roaming charges, exceeding your plan minutes, and the like, make up for it. The fact that they can't send a bill to a pre-paid account means they have to actually charge an honest price at which they make a profit, instead of advertising something too cheaply and shafting everyone in the fine print.
my friend has flashcom and they are horrible. It took flashcom 3 WEEKS to even have someone come out and look at it.
.{redmist}.
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I have had a very similar experience with Phoenix Networks and Rhythms DSL providers. I have been with my local ISP for years, however, due to problems with USWest they were unable to offer DSL to my home---even though the guy next door could get it. Finally, after about 8 months of battling USWest I heard of Phoenix Networks & Rhythms through a friend. I decided it couldn't hurt to sign up and after three months they actually delivered. It was great until the first problem. A router went down on alter.net and I was unable to access my email and various other services through their DSL (my local ISP dialup could still access the services). I called up their technical support and they told me it was none of their business since it was 'outside' of their network. I would have been satisfied with a simple, "we know there is a problem and have contacted the owner of..." type answer, but instead I was informed that it was none of their business! In my opinion that translates to "We don't know and don't care for your business." and as soon as I can I am cancelling my business with them. I used them as a last resort for DSL and I certainly got last chance performance out of them. The problem took care of itself after about 12 hours so I was unable to access my email for 12 hours thanks to them---I know, pretty harsh. :-) Hopefully I will be able to use the lines for DSL from my local ISP who are 100 times more competent than the 'Big Boys'.
Ah, another Speakeasy customer. Sort of sounds like you work for them, too.
:), and not only did the tech know exactly what I was talking about when I told him what was wrong and how to use nslookup to diagnose the problem, he also had the right people on the phone and the problem fixed within an hour.
:)
I switched to Speakeasy from US West a while ago. My 1929 apartment building only has a single twisted pair (cloth covered!) coming into the unit, so I had to ditch US West for local phone service and go wireless, but I haven't looked back. It doesn't cost me much more.
Yes, the DSL line is pretty solid. If anything does go wrong, though, I find myself sitting on the phone for at least half an hour before anyone picks up. When they do pick up, you tend to get a pretty clueful tech, so I can't complain, but waiting is always frustrating.
Though the network is solid, the software/sysadmin side of things seems lax. This past weekend, *.dsl.speakeasy.net fell out of DNS, while the reverse mapping was still working. This screwed with just about all of the services I have running at home. I think this persisted for as much as 48 hours before I noticed and picked up the phone. I called in the report on memorial day (the only time I haven't had to wait for a tech to pick up
I've also had lots of trouble with http://www.speakeasy.net/tac -- it looks like that system is still in beta. Frustrating to no end, but then, I used to work for a colossal internet retailer, and I know how hard it can be to debug a complex cgi app.
The one I worked with was thrown together in a hurry and then balooned by an army of amateurs working for a hoarde of ambitious, feature-happy managers (result: 75MB compiled executable with its own garbage collector and ad-hock scripting language). But it worked, damnit.
Say, are you guys hiring ?
This is a very good point. Many times this is the only way to get USWorst to get anything done with the lines. Who should I contact for Rhythms & Phoenix Networks DSL? Is there somewhere that lists which regulators should be contacted for specific services?
I thought DSL was well developed enough to not have any sort of major problems but I was wrong. I signed up for DSL with Ameritech (Who was recently bought by SBC) but when the guy came, nothing happened. It didnt work. Ameritech is my local phone provider and so it doesn't really matter how many there are. It still won't work.
Having used FlashComm, BellSouth.net and Telocity I would advise you to ditch FlashComm right now if at all possible. If they have not yet hooked you up they are probably in breach of contract. If you have the choice don't allow them to finish hooking you up. Tell them their service has been pitiful and you want out right now. Here's what I know about DSL providers at the moment, FlashComm was horrible and always delivered weeks behind schedule. BellSouth.net was generally on time, but their service was pitiful and the connection was always being dropped (plus it was that awful PPPoE stuff), I have nothing but good things to say about Telocity. They had me hooked up in less than a month, they didn't make me sign a contract at all, they gave me a static IP and explicitly allow me to run an internal network over their service. Also in my agreement with them it says that if I ever move they will transfer the connection (with the same IP) to my new place of residence at no cost to me. They also have very easy setup instructions for PCs, Macs, and *nixs. I highly recommend anyone getting DSL get Telocity.
I ordered DSL from Onvoy.
I posted my diary of the experience on my home page.
All because I can't get cable and the phone company won't service my area.
timbu
You know... I find the fact that Americans take things for granted and do not want to know the information until something goes wrong? My question is why did not know of the process when you wanted the DSL line? Is the problem the fact they are outsource or the fact that you did not know who you should have notified when the problem occurred? DSL is much better than cable modem (or crap modem). I know in this part of the country AT&T have had many outages with their home server the home network. I know DSL can achive faster periods in this part of the country than cable modems. That is my thoughts. Take as I see it. I always expect something to go wrong so I try to get the 411 on any support issues......
Consider yourself one of the lucky few. I work for Concentric and my DSL line took approximately 4 months to get installed. There are many, many horror stories about people ordering DSL lines, getting tired of waiting, and just canceling the order. Unfortunately, when you have so many different companies involved (LEC, CLEC, ISP)if any one person at any of the three companies makes a mistake then your order gets delayed. People are human and mistakes do happen, it's just a matter of probability. With more people handling your order, the probability is increased.
DSL; I believe the problems you describe come into play with any sort of net access that you don't purchase directly.
.. to the CFO. It's a nightmare for me.
With our WAN we purchased from AT&T (don't ask, I wasn't involved then) who then cobbled together the details for us, instead of us having to contact and sign 42 different contracts for 42 major markets. It was a "godsend"
Today is a prime example. I fired a network admin this morning, so I came into our KC office to pursue the usual security avenues. Lo and behold, the fractional T was down. 7 hours later, it was up and running - thank God for a Qwest backup. (Is it me, or does AT&T have the worst frame network in the world?)
Anyway, the problem was so hard to have fixed because we contacted our agent, who contacted AT&T, who contacted SWBELL, who decided it wasn't their problem, and the finger pointing just kept on going.
Blah.
B
My reality check bounced.
God man, I'm sorry. I couldn't imagine being without DSL for 2 1/2 weeks! :)
--GnrcMan--
Incidentally, if you get PacBell DSL, you're not allowed to use it to criticise PacBell Internet Services. Read the service agreement.
The real problem is with sales and marketing - they got ahold of info about dsl and started selling the ()*&!@* out of it before the techs were ready. (This from a senior exec at pac bell)
anyway, sales was selling FAR more than tech could hope to deliver, hence the 6-8 week lead time. they are continuing to sell, without allowing the techs to catch up, so there is no time to slow down and get the infrastructure caught up and build logically planned expansion.
im using an enhanced dsl package from pac bell - (5 static ips), and love it (the only dsl down time ive had is courtesy of pg&e - stuff doesnt work without electricity.) Now if pac bell would just fix their email system (i guess thats why ive set up a linux box as a firewall/web server/mail host), and no comment on the lack of spam filtering from them.
i guess im one of the lucky ones - 6 week wait, plug and chug, and 8 months of high speed bliss.
best advice i have, is if you have one of these horror stories, find out who the ceo's of the companies are and write to them directly, cc'ing your local newspaper and local tv news department (great high tech story with a pro consumer angle - new departments love that (*&^. )
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
My DSL connection is also a dynamic IP... causes all sorts of instabilities... It seems to be a real toss up between DSL and Cable, although, especially now, cable seems to be averaging better speeds.
I recently went through the ordeal of transfering an existing ADSL account from one phone number to another. Bell Atlantic seems to go out of it's way to make things difficult. In my case no hardware needed to be installed, in my computer or in the apartment complex, it was already wired for DSL. Just to transfer the number, they said a minimum of 15 business days and a $99 dollar setup fee. When I asked them why, they said it's because the treat transfers as a closing of the old account and a creation of a new one. So it seems they're just manufacturing work for themselves. It ended up being 18 business days and when I got on the phone with them the day it was actually activated, I finally got in touch with a tech in the broadband department who had it activated in about 20 minutes. To top things off BA still tried to charge me for the month that my DSL service was down. I'm now getting DSL through a local provider in Pittsburgh, Stargate. It's overall a better experience. There's still the abysmal slowness of BAs administration, but Stargate deals with them for me. Also Stargates network isn't near as oversold as BAs. I'm on a 640k download account and on BAs network I got 60k or so max and only in the middle of the night, during peak times it was as slow as 8 to 10k per second most of the time. With Stargate 50 to 60 no matter the time of day.
Now that a southwestern bell guy has strung a new wire from the phone pole to the telephone box on the outside of my house, a guy from my line provider, ip communications, is coming tomorrow morning to do the inside wiring. I was wondering, do these guys run new wires through the walls, or do they use an unused pair in my existing phone jacket? If my house is 30 years old and he uses the existing wiring, would i see any performance increase if I strung my own wire? What wire do i use for that purpose? Thanks, Zeus305
Black holes are where god divided by zero
I have a cable modem thru Cox Internet Services (a div of cox communications) and get 2 mb down, 1 mb up, no ports blocked, I have been online without a break for close to 3 months now. Cable modems are just like ISP's, some are good, and some suck ass. Luckily, I got the good one...
I am a Flashcom user and had nothing but problems with them from the start, 3 times in the same month they rebuilt my route with out telling me and each time I called because my service was down, I was told I had made changes at my pc, unitl I told them I was a Unix administrator for 15 years +, I was treated as if I was retarded and didnt know that the service that was working 5 minutes previous which stopped working had done so because I made changes with out knowing I had, "ha", there support is horrible and each time there was nothing but finger pointing, ip changes without telling me and literal incompetance.
Unix Diva for web space http://thesankofegroup.com for business recources http://www.business-to-business-web-services
I tried to get BellSouth's "Fast Internet" directly recently, and here's what I went through.
The light at the end of the tunnel? An excellent company called I-55 Internet does DSL here. They go through Bell South for the line and what-not of course, but they have a unique (in my experience) relationship that allows them to think for themselves. I explained what had happened and the sales fella gave me the Ethernet Modem and my networking info. Bang zoom, to the moon.
As an epilogue, the phone jack in the apartment's office can't negotiate a DSL connection, so my girlfriend's Mac is currently the only computer connected to the DSL line.
The moral? Third party DSL providers GOOOD.
Come to think of it, I think this problem sounds familiar
We've been using Crosslink.net, and their service also sucks. The technical support people are very friendly, but they never have any clue what is wrong. Most of the reps do not even know basic networking. The real problem seems to be that they subcontract everything out to 3rd party providers, so you're always waiting on the phone for them to contact a 3rd party. Our network regularly goes down 2-3 times a week, usually for somewhere between 2-10 hours. Also, once it was running at 0.2k/s for an entire week and they couldn't even "verify" that there was a problem. We've only had Crosslink for a few months, but I'm ready to try someone else.
I hear that CAIS/Covad at least has a 95% uptime guarantee or something like that.
Well... dang, I did a little research in my area, *cough* I happen to work for a ISP in Cincinnati that sells "third Party" ADSL, from what I have noticed, you will still see the same inefficiancy and usually less helpful technical support if you go directly with the phone companies branded internet services....Otherwise....ugh... cable... in our area.. Roadrunner.. sux.. extremely, flaky nameservers and shared bandwith .. nightmares all around...