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Verizon's DSL Gets Naked
Ant writes "According to Broadband Reports' news story, Verizon today announced they are now offering 'naked DSL' service (DSL without mandatory local service) in the Northeast. CBS/Marketwatch indicates Northeast customers (ex-NYNEX and Bell Atlantic) can cut or switch their local service with no penalty, starting today. The company insists the move will be national in time, but gave no timeline for when naked DSL would be available elsewhere. Verizon had promised this in May of last year, but then seemingly backtracked."
I've been wanting this for years. So have many other people. Hopefully this will take off and show other phone companies where their customers want them to go.
Verizon's Fios puts their DSL to shame where available - naked or not. $50 a month for 15Mbps down and 2 up. Hot hot hot.
Bah, those of us with Verizon DSL in Florida just got our rates raised unless we sign a year long contract. I think I'm paying something like $40/month just for DSL (more when you factor in the phone line that I don't use, with taxes it comes out to $63.75/month). Where I live Verizon is the only choice for DSL, and cable modem service is even more expensive if you don't already have cable television (at least it was before the new rate raise, I'll have to reconsider cable modem service when I move in June). I even thought about just going with dialup. But I'd still have to pay the $20/month for a phone line I don't use so it wouldn't be worth it.
With the RBOCs getting on board with VOIP you will see this happen with all the US telcos. There is talk about pair bonding in the works for DSL which will provide 26 meg in the next year or so. My ISP has 6 meg now. With those speed increases, VOIP and IPTV (we shall see) become viable and the need for regular DSL (with the clothes on) will no longer be needed. I know that in the eyes of the consumer that time has passed. However it is a big move when the phone companies see it as well.
Er... so this means that if I disconnect my local phone service, then the line to my house will oxidize and I would be unable to re-connect it next year?
Yeah... total BS. You need the *voltage* but not *dial tone*. The only thing standing in the way of naked DSL in Canada is that Bell wants to force you to get a landline.
I wouldn't deal with Qwest. Those are the folks who lied to me repeatedly just to get me to sign up. Their technical staff and sales people told me "static IPs are included in the monthly price". We even talked about using one of the free DNS services to map the static IP to a name (since Qwest didn't do that.) After installation, I was told "static IP is an extra cost feature, $16/month" and "we will not provide the service we told you we would provide to get you to sign up."
I'd call it fraud, myself.
I just cancelled Verizon today, having switched to Comcast and tried it for a couple weeks, in the West LA (Manhatten Beach/Marina Del Rey/LAX) area.
I play Desert Combat a lot, and I used to get great pings - 10-30 or so. However, after about 9 months of great service, suddenly I was getting 70 ping as an average, with frequent prolonged rapid fluctuations between 20 and 200, sometimes settling out at 150. This happened with various servers and various games. Tracert showed the problem was the Verizon/Level3 (I think it was Level3, whoever the upstream provider is) hookup... but because the IP showing the ping problems in Tracert is listed as being owned by Level3, not by Verizon, they claimed the problem was not their fault and they could do nothing (HELLO! Thats YOUR uplink!)
So I switched to Comcast. Now I get 500 KB(KByte, not Kbit) downloads from FilePlanet and elsewhere - 3x faster than what my 1.5megabit DSL gave me - and an average ping of 20-30 to the servers I play on.
I loved Verizon for the 9 months I used it, until the ping problem. After that... it was all downhill. Comcast gives me 3x the throughput and a much better latency than Verizon, for $5/mth more.
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qwest has been selling naked dsl to all comers for over a year.
where they can, of course. you have to meet the technical specs, generally being low bridge tap, no voice coil loads on the pair, and within some 16-18 kilofeet of the dslam.
this unfortunately is the major limiting factor for DSL wannabuys; most lines were rebuilt or extended in the 60s and 70s, and coils were religion in those times every 6 kfeet apart.
but you gotta try and agitate if you can't qualify to get your section rehabbed or another dslam put in remotely to get the service.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
For me it was Verizon vs Time Warner. I ended up choosing Verizon after having Time Warner for a few months. It came down to these reasons.
1. Cable provides faster overall throughput but Verizon has faster upstream speeds (important for me because I run servers).
2. Verizon appears to have a less restrictive policy towards capping, so no worries about downloading/uploading as much as you want.
3. The Verizon news servers are excellent.
4. Personally I had a terrible experience with cable. During some periods of the day the packet loss was horrendous. I don't know if this was the high usage periods or not, but tech support saw the problem and I spent 5 months trying to fix the problem with them and they just marked it as a chronic issue without doing anything.
5. With DSL my ping times appear to be much lower.
I just use my wrt54g, and it works like a charm.
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