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On the Reliability of DSL Providers...
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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:
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):
Hope this helps.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
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.