On the Reliability of DSL Providers...

vt@home asks: "It so happened that I have to find a provider again. @Home is not available at my current location, US West says my location is not good enough for DSL, yet, many DSL providers (Verio and Bazillion, to name a few) claim that they can provide me with at least 144K connection. It's alarming that most of the people who have any opinion about DSL, have a negative one (see DSL Reports for one), and the positive opinions look suspiciously like stroturfers. Additional points of concern are the 1 year commitments, and the unusually long time wait time before the service is activated (4-6 weeks on paper could turn into months). So the question is, what is a reliable source that rates the DSL providers? Do you guys have anything to say about your DSL provider, no matter good or bad? If you ever switched from the cable modem to DSL (or back), how was it? Responses about Phoenix Metro will be much appreciated."

As someone personally suffering in DSL Limbo, I can understand vt@home's frustration. I ordered my DSL way back at the end of July and was told "6 weeks" by the company that's offering DSL in my area. Of course, it's now nearing the end of September and although I was promised that Bell-Atlantic (now Verizon) would make the necessary connections last Friday. It's Tuesday and nary a Verizon truck in site with my line. I can't blame the company I initially signed up with. They made the offer in good faith, but we both have been screwed by the local telco. Strike withstanding, I figure I should have seen someone by now, yet I haven't. This story is not unusual in the pursuit of DSL.

So if you have DSL, please share your experiences good or bad and tell us what you think of your provider. If anything it might help the next person in search of broadband prepare for the long waits and the excuses if their service isn't delivered as promised.

Comments

IDSL

[NetJunkie]

The 144Kb quote the others give is for IDSL. It's basically ISDN. It can go a lot further than ADSL, but costs a lot more. We are outside the range of ADSL and use IDSL and it works great. Just don't expect great speeds.

You'll probably have to go to a 3rd party providor, we use Speakeasy and are VERY happy with them. Most Telcos won't deal with IDSL. They prefer the quick ADSL installs. People that pay more for IDSL are usually "expert" users and require more service (DNS, More IPs..etc). They prefer to make the quick buck on web surfers.

I've given up

[rkent]

I live in Tucson, so I'll be watching these responses closely as well :) As of now, I've basically given up on DSL. PSN.net promised me they could do it, but USWest assured me that the phone lines in my building weren't good enough (I live in an apartment - doh!).

I was looking at alternatives, including cable modem, and one of the other things I came across was sprint wireless. The price looks about the same as DSL, and installation is free at the moment. However, the "details" section on their product page pretty much said "this is fast internet service." Thanks. Does anyone have any experience with this? What IS the service, actually? Does it depend on existing phone lines at all? If not, could be the way to go...

Re:US West

[British]

In the half year I've had DSL with US west in the twin cities, I've only had ONE outage(2 weeks ago). I confirmed with tech support the area was down, and it was up in less than 8 hours.

As for DSL providers, I was originally told I didn't qualify by us west. I checked into another company(shoot, forgot my name), which said they did reach out into my area, but the pricing was horrible. 1 year commitment, HUGE up front fee. Any change to your service(up/down on your bandwidth) had a charge, miss the tech showing up to your place, you get charged.

ALL of these charges were in the 3-figure range, so I suspect they were catering to businesses.

Half a year later I sign up for US West's deal, now being qualified. I was up in running within a week of me calling. I haven't been dissatisified at all with them. Maybe I'm just lucky.

They even bumped up my bandwidth from 256 to 640 for free.

Tried Wireless?

[ewhac]

Check to see if there are any wireless Internet providers in your area. The rates in the SF Bay area tend to be higher than for a hard line of the same speed. However, it may be viable in rural areas where it's all too easy to be more than DSL's maximum 15K feet from the central office.

Schwab

DSL needs a telco box at the customer end

[Animats]

The big problem with DSL is that there's usually no carrier equipment at the customer end that the central office can talk to. The way it ought to work is that the carrier provides you with a small router box, they're responsible for the router and everything upstream of it, and you're responsible for your side. Then they can ping and talk to the router box, maybe even talk SNMP to it or make it do loopback tests for them, and you can ping the router and see if things are up locally on your side. That eliminates any need for telco tech support to mess with Microsoft software.

Some of the smaller DSL providers do in fact work that way, but the telcos generally don't. Without this, the product is unmaintainable.

The problem is that DSL was designed when routers were expensive. Small routers are down around $100 now, and dropping, so that's no longer an issue.

Why You See So Many Negative Reviews

[Hrunting]

Basically, people aren't moved to action until something goes wrong. I had DSL last summer in my apartment (summer apartment). Installation was painless. Service was great. I had no problems, and of course, there were no problems with my location. My father has also had DSL for over a year with very little in the way of problems (SWB accidentally switched him off his current ISP to theirs at one point, but a phone call cleared that up).

However, this summer, I tried to sign up for DSL at my new residence. I was told I was in the self-install area. Then I was told I wasn't. Then I was told I wasn't even eligible. In the span of two months I went from being able to just plug in the equipment to not being able to use it at all. I posted a few reviews, but lost interest. Of course, last summer, when the DSL installation went smoothly, I could care less about posting to message boards; I was too busy exploring the speeds that DSL gave me.

If you're a business. Put up the cash and get a T1. Don't depend on DSL and don't depend on ISDN. If you're a home consumer, go for DSL, but don't get pissed when it doesn't go your way. It works for some and it doesn't work for others. Get ISDN through an alternate provider if you can't get DSL. They're generally a lot (10-20%) cheaper, and the speeds are about the same as IDSL.

Take Notes, Be A Jerk

[waldoj]

I get my connections through Intelos, a Central Virginia provider. Though I have no gripes about the quality of service, I've got to say that even this relatively-small, regional provider has absolutely abysmal install times. They like to blame it on Sprint, but it's quite frequently not Sprint's fault.

I've had about half a dozen installs from Intelos, all have been at least a month late. One was five months later than the four weeks that was promised. I really pushed on them hard for my home install about six months ago, and found that my sales representative had never filed any of the paperwork, despite his repeated assurances that Sprint was just slowing things down. Unfortunately, it look four weeks to find that out.

My biggest suggestion is this: take notes Everytime that you talk to a potential provider, record the date and time, number that you talked to, name of who you talked to, and what you talked about, complete with quotes. I've hit dead-ends so many times because I can't tell the Latrinas from the Britannys after a while. And it's assumed that I'm lying if I can't tell them the exact date, time and individual. Don't be a pushover.

If you do this, and behave like a complete asshole, you'll probably get good results.

-Waldo

Telcos and other lower forms of life

[Old Man Kensey]

Here in Charlottesville, your choices are Sprint (our ILEC), Ntelos (formerly CFW/Intelos, a local CLEC/ISP), or Cornerstone (a recently-acquired subsidiary of Ntelos).

Sprint being the sleazy telco they are, and their ADSL offerings being way overpriced anyway, I didn't even look hard at them. They also will tell you things like Linux and NAT "won't work -- people have tried, believe me" even though they do (at the moment at least). Basically if you don't have Windows, or at least say you do, they won't talk to you.

CFW's service is MVL. What I can find about MVL leads me to believe it essentially sacrifices top-end bandwidth to get greater distance. I got CFW's 384K MVL service (the other option is 768K) last year, and had it till I moved in June. The service was great, but getting it installed and getting a correct bill from them was a nightmare. They lost my first payment and only recently did they agree to credit anything to my account. This is nothing new for them apparently -- I found at least 3 other horror stories of CFW billing screwups.

Now I've ditched them, and I'm getting service through their subsidiary Cornerstone. This should be a lot better, because I'm actually getting responses to my questions and I know a lot of people there, so billing disputes should be practically nonexistent.

Tips:

• Investigate resellers. The only thing they provide is customer service, and they know it. They also know you can usually get it from the source cheaper, so there's incentive for them to get things right.

• Know how to contact your state utility regulation board. In most states telcos are a regulated monopoly, so there's usually some oversight board. Here in Virginia that duty lies with the State Corporation Commission, and they wield the baseball bat of authority with a will (a call from them just got me a big chunk of "late fees" removed from my old CFW bill).

• Don't let the telco stonewall you. If they say the signal test was bad but you're in reasonable range, ask when the test was done. If it was a long time ago, tell them to test it again.

• Be ready to forgo support, but don't hesitate to escalate things if you know it's not a problem on your end. If the LINK light on your modem goes out, don't hesitate to demand to talk with someone in Ops/engineering, regardless of their support policy re: Linux/other freenix -- after all, how could that be an OS problem?

Basically be ready to fight tooth and nail for your consumer rights regardless of what you're told. But then as Slashdotters most of us know that already.

SpeakEasy is Politically Aware

[LionKimbro]

That's interesting; I've only received nothing but the kindest of service from SpeakEasy.

SpeakEasy is the most politically aware and open network, having made an explicit commitment to freedoms in their mission statement and terms of service. I had to turn down several ISP's (such as InternetConnect) because of their draconian TOS (which included that they can charge me $1,000 if I potentially infringe on IP). SpeakEasy is the only ISP I trust.

Just recently, Nader spoke at the SpeakEasy cafe off 2nd and Bell, downtown Seattle. SpeakEasy has lent the back room to Free Radio Seattle as well. If SpeakEasy isn't a safe ISP, I don't know who is.

PacBell DSL, 6 Mb/s

[davidb54]

I have had DSL through PacBell for most of the past year. By sheer luck, when I moved to San Francisco I picked a location which happened to be about 2 blocks from a phone office. When the guy came by to check my line for my maximum download rate, he said "8.3 Megabits per second". Pacbell doesn't let you get away with that kind of speed but they do give you 6 Mb/s if you pay some extra. So naturally I paid extra. It's worth it sometimes, although not as often as you might think. Not long ago I downloaded a 288 MB file (Oracle 8i for Linux) in about 3.5 minutes. That was cool, but most of the time my download speed is limited by the other end of the pipe.

A friend of mine who works in the ADSL group at Texas Instruments told me that the falloff in bandwidth with distance from the phone office is actually pretty negligible until you get to about 2 km. After that you start losing bandwidth due to signal attenuation (AC conductivity of copper goes as 1/f^2 where f is the frequency of the alternating current, and ADSL uses frequencies up to at least 1 MHz IIRC). The point is, if you live within a mile of the phone office, life is great. If you live within 3 miles, life is tolerable. If you live farther away than that, then you should move or figure out some other broadband solution.

Dave Bailey

I WORK for the people getting you DSL...

[trims]

OK, I live in the SF Bay area, and I work for one of the national DSL providers (NOT the ISP, but the people who actually deliver the line for you, and NOT one of the ILECs). I can't name them specifically, but let's just say they aren't Rhythms.

DSL delivery generally has a couple of major problems (I'm the primary troubleshooter on long-overdue orders, so I see alot of this). If one of these happens, it can take weeks to fix, much of which is due to the back-and-forth nature of fixing problems that require interaction between 3 or 4 HUGE companies. Think: we talk to ISP, determine there is a problem, talk to ILEC, twiddle a bit, talk to ILEC, talk to ILEC, ILEC does something, we look at it, talk to ILEC, talk to end-user, talk to ILEC, etc....

In general, we're closing about 50-60% of our orders within 1 month. The goal is 75% by calendar year end, and 90% for next year. However, if an order doesn't get closed within 1 month, it averages 8-12 weeks to get closed.

Unless you work at an I/CLEC, you have no idea how screwed up the physical plant for the phone system is. Line conditioners, repeaters, bad wiring installs, mismatched/mislabeled wiring - it's a wonder people get anything installed. Alot of this can be blamed on the "get it done, and don't worry about it" attitude of the ILEC. However, a large amount is also due to the fact that the phone system was (and is) designed to deliver VOICE PHONE service, and things that are done to improve voice are often harmful for data carriers.

Another problem is that we're one of the few (if not ONLY) DSL people who actually have an automated ordering system. That is, when you give your info to an ISP, they can automatically enter it into our system, which automatically makes the ILEC loop order, starts the network provisioning, puts in the ATM parameters, etc. Virtually everyone else does this by hand. Our system works about 90% of the time, and getting better. And we're still averaging 4 weeks. Think about the other guys....

A couple of things that will speed your DSL order, no matter who you place it with:

• Make sure you have the correct address/zip code - you have no idea how many problems we have with people not giving us the correct address. By address, I mean the one that the phone company bills you at - this occassionally isn't your postal address. If you're not sure, CALL THE PHONE COMPANY AHEAD OF TIME. As them what they think your phone delivery address is, and not your billing address. Generally, this is only a problem in multi-unit dwellings, or things like rowhouses.
• Figure out where you want the DSL line to go. By this I mean identify the plug where you want the DSL line to come out of. If you can get your hands on some basic line-testing stuff (borrow one from your work if you can), test that this line is indeed wired into your external exchange. I know this sounds complex, but it really isn't. You just need to verify that the jack is really hooked up.
• Respone quickly to any email/phone correspondence from the DSL provider. You can save yourself alot of pain by quickly replying to any messages you get. That helps the DSL people solve problems faster, and get your line in quicker.

DSL is certainly not a smooth install for everyone yet. With the coming of line-sharing by all DSL providers, install times should go down considerably, since they can piggyback on your existing phone line, and don't have to run a new one. Honestly, though, I doubt you'll ever see times drop below an average of 2 weeks. The physical phone plant is just too messy.

Also, here are some 'rule-of-thumb' distances for various services (note that the distance from the CO is measured in feet of actual wire - it can be hard to figure that out, since wire often runs in a decidedly indirect path between you and your CO):

• ADSL: 15,000 feet for minimum 384/128. You can usually get about 1Mbps at around 11,000.
• SDSL: 15,000 feet for 192, 12,000 for 384, 9,000 for 768, 8,000 for 1.1, and 7,000 for 1.5.
• IDSL: 144 at up to about 22,000, though many won't sell you it at distances over 18,000.
• RADSL: up to 8Mbps at about 6,000. This is rare as of yet.

Hope this helps.

-Erik

Re:I WORK for the people getting you DSL...

[Fishstick]

I'm not sure which one Ameritech is or what the difference is, but I know they used to be referred to as a CLEC, I don't know what an ILEC is).

LEC means Local Exchange Carrier and the I is for incumbent, which Ameritech is. C is for Competitive, which Ameritech is not. ;-)

All stems from the 1996 Telecom act where local telephone monopoly was supposed to be opened up to all comers (esp, ld companies like AT&T and Sprint). All this about unbundling the local loop (the copper between your house and the central telephone office). Since it isn't practical for the CLECs to lay new copper to everyone's location, they have facilities in the ILEC's physical plant.

In the case of the so-called "Data CLECs", the xDSL equipment sits at the Baby Bell's central office and taps into the copper loop coming from your house there in what I think they call the DSLAM.

If you go with Ameritech or another extablished local carrier for DSL, you potentially eliminate some of the back-and forth described in the top post of this thread.

DSLreports.com *is* reliable.

[hatless]

DSLreports.com is reliable in my experience. Extremely so.

Plenty of people will have perfectly smooth service from a "bad" provider and there will be people with bad service from a "good" one, but trust the overall vibe you get on a given provider on DSLreports. If it seems negative and gloomy, that's because it is. Welcome to DSL.

I'm not sure what your problem is. OK, USWest won't serve you, but DSLreports found providers that will. So find a decently-rated one and go with them. Or don't. Can't get the speed you want? You're probably too far away from the nearest central office equipped for DSL. Suck it up.

The thing with DSL is that fast DSL business service costs roughly 1/4 the price of a T1, and you'll likely find you have 4 times the number and duration of outages. You get what you pay for. If reliability isn't critical and you can deal with the occasional 4-10 hours of downtime every other month, you'll be okay.

As for residential DSL, you may be wondering why fast residential DSL costs 1/4 what the slowest business DSL costs. The answer, as I've learned from experience, is again reliability. Once again, do the math. Assume 4 times the number and severity of outages that you'd get with comparable business DSL. I assume this is because a customer paying 6 times as much gets 6 times the engineering resources devoted to it.

My Verizon (née BellAtlantic) residential service is down an average of 2 days a month. In the last month, I've had a 4-day outage and a 2-day outage as well as countless disconnects (actually, I could look at my logs and count them, but I don't feel like it).

Sounds bad, right? But here's the kicker. Though I'm switching my (small but growing) company from DSL to a T1, I have no desire to switch to a cable modem at home, which brings a whole different set of issues. I'm sticking with DSL until something genuinely better comes along. Now I just need to switch out of Verizon.

Re:SWBell.Net

[Mr. Protocol]

Linksys 4-port Cable/DSL routers purport to support PPoE, so you could just hook up one of these and run up to four computers behind it, running any OS you like.

ObNote: I own such a Linksys box but AT&T Broadband doesn't run PPoE over their cable modem service (yet), so I haven't tested the PPoE software in the Linksys box.

Here in Tempe AZ

[leereyno]

We have DSL and have had no problems with it at all. We're actually too far away from the "home office" (what a BS ridden euphemism) and our line was installed by mistake. Even so, after boosting the voltage the router uses for its uplink we got a 384/256 connection that is stable and hasn't given us any trouble at all.

We're using USWest to provide the copper of course, but we certainly aren't using them for our ISP. No, we're using another company called Inficad which provides us with a static IP which is always on. We're paying a little extra to go with Inficad, but I know better than to use "UsWorst." To be fair USwest does offer a good 56k dialup service, at least in my area. Even so, I'd heard enough rumors of problems with their DSL to avoid using them.

One of the nice things about using a small company like inficad is that they aren't bandwidth nazi's. They don't care if I set up apache or even an FTP server (not that I have one, I'm not some lame brained warez "dood"). Also we get 5 email addresses and 50 megs of web space if we want to set up a page on their servers. Not a bad deal for ten extra bucks a month.

No, I don't work for inficad and no I don't get kickbacks from them. I'm just happy with the service they have provided and wanted to pass this experience on as DSL seems to be taking a PR pounding.

Lee Reynolds