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Your Qwest Leads To MSN
bee writes: "Qwest.net has announced an alliance with MSN that will 'transition' Qwest's dialup and DSL customers to MSN Internet Access. If you're a Macintosh user, you'll be able to continue on Qwest until they figure out what to do with you. Zero mention, of course, is made of Linux or BSD. Here's the FAQ they're pointing their customers to."
Basically I think the "Windows only" thing is probably only an issue for people with internal Intel DSL routers. Since these things actually sit in a PCI slot, they need drivers and if those drivers are only available for Windows, that's what you have to go with. However when you have an external router, it's different. It has a phone jack on one side, and eithernet on the other. It is actually what talks to the equipment and logs you in and so on, the system behind it has no involvement.
I'm additonally unwilling to leave Qwest since they seem to be the only ISP willing to work with me on the static IP thing. None of the other ISPs I talked to had a workable deal for static IPs, and some just wouldn't offer them at all.
At any rate, I'm not staying with their service just ecause it works with my stuff (I also have a Linux server on the network), but rather because they have the best deal right now. If someone else can offer me something equal or better to what Qwest has, I'd consider switching but I'm not going to move to an inferior solution.
Think of it this way. You're a new computer user. You want to check out this thing called 'the Internet'. So you boot up your brand new out of the box computer and see an icon for MSN that gets you "connected to the Internet".
What do you think you'd use? It'd be easiest to just click on that link and follow the instructions. Other ISPs? What's an ISP?
Same reason AOL's going for the link on the desktop sales slant. Newbies will eat it up. They don't care if the connection is crap. It's what they're comfortable with doing. And that's probably all that's really going to matter to them.
When will they stop twisting the jargon!? "Narrowband"? The opposite of broadband is baseband, as in 10Base(band)T. Broadband does not mean "Big fat and fast line to the internet", but rather a single data cable that carries more than one type of a signal. Your CATV line is broadband because it can carry network data AND your usual TV channels. DSL (at least ADSL) is broadband because it can carry your phone (voice and low-frequency sound-based data) signals and your network connection. Ethernet is NOT broadband, even though it's faster than DSL, because it can only carry data signals... unless you happen to be one of those that happens to be using a very unusual kind of ethernet that was hardly implemented... I think it was called 10Broad36, and ran over 75 Ohm Coaxial. (aka, coaxial TV cable.)
... and using linux, or any other PPP capable device on it is not hard... You do not need to use the software at all, the username just needs to be prefixed with MSN/ and you need the, easily accessable DNS server IP's which tech support would give you in a heartbeat.