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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 was hoping now I could believe to surf naked without me feeling ashamed. :(
I still have to live with the suffering, it seems.
Clicked pie.
I haven't had a landline in years. I live with just my cellphone and cable modem. If Verizon had offered naked DSL when I moved a few years back they'd have gotten my service instead of a cable company.
If it makes it to where I am, I would gladly switch to dsl instead my cable. I don't need all the bandwidth that cable provides, but DSL costs just as much right now because I have to have a phone line with it. (I use a cell phone)
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Is Verizon actually calling it "Naked DSL"?
If they are...can't wait to see the commercials for it.
Put that back on, I don't want to see that!!!
http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/44065
In Canada, they can't offer naked DSL since the lines would oxidize and fail. Folks, I am not making this stuff up.
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.
Well shouldnt this really be the way it should always have been. ,dosn't work like this where im from , they just hit you with a contract for 2 years).
The fact they they try to impose a mandatory term of services on people is has always been something i have had a great deal of problems with (im not from the USA
Very few other service industry impose such penalites upon us , infact its quite odd to me that this behaviour has been allowed , are there not laws top prevent companys from abusing monopolys in this way .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
...will take off... I think they already have.
Too little, too late for me. I asked them to do this for me at the begining of the year. I had used their DSL for a year, and I got about 3.0 MB down (400kbs up) for about 80 bucks a month. It would have been 30, except for the fact that the phone service costed the difference. I never used the phone, and I wanted cheaper DSL. When they kept saying it wouldn't happen, I dropped verizon and picked up my local cable company for broadband. I get 4 mb down and .5 mb up for 50 bucks a month, without Verizon's shit.
Open Source Sushi
Seriously, if Verizon, or any other phone company would just start offering service EVERYWHERE, instead of JUST in localized areas, so that we had truly competitive phone lines, then I would be happy.
I hate that I can't get DSL without phone service--I too am a vonage user, so that's why I hate it. Unfortunately, my cable company sucks, and I have a period every other day or so when my line goes down mysteriously, and I have to reset my vonage box or my cable modem (or both).
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
that's where Naked DSL would go over really well.
But I hear they use FireWire there instead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
So, somebody remind me, do we hate Verizon now, for their CEO hating municipal wifi? Or do we love them for being the first behemoth telco to offer naked DSL in a big way? What's the Slashdot party line now?
Note the importance of this. There must be a lot of unused copper pairs in Verizons service area for them to even consider doing this. It suggests that a good fraction of the people living in the northeast are dispensing with landlines. In other words, Verizon's core business, which has been the biggest industry in the U.S. for over a century, is dying.
I wondered the same thing the other day. According to Wikipedia, DNS = Domain Name System, so "DNS Server" is correct and not redundant.
I just feel sorry for their call center people since the DNS crap started. They must be swamped. Have they resolved the issues yet? My router is still using 4.2.2.1 for now after I realized the problem was apparently recurring.
Phone company in these parts is BellSouth, with their overpriced "FastAccess" DSL, which I used from 2001 through last summer, at which point there were BellSouth service problems and a nice introductory deal going with Comcast. Haven't really regretted the switch.
My main beef is still the upstream bandwidth throttling on pretty much all consumer-grade broadband services. I regularly get over 400KB/s while downloading large files, but 30KB/s saturates my upstream and pretty much brings my internet connection to a halt.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
I just had my Bell Canada landline cancelled today (I live in mid-town Toronto).
The CRTC (government regulator) ordered Bell to do what it promised last year by the end of March 2005, and they did. Bell is "soft-launching" it for now (i.e., you have to call and ask, they aren't advertising it on their website, for the obvious reason that they are rolling out their own VoIP in Ontario/Quebec this year)
But now I have Sympatico Hi-Speed (2mb/s) and Vonage VoIP (500min/month for $20CDN), with no landline (which beats $35/month for a landline with just Call Display)
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.
I have Verizon DSL and I have had few problems until just recently. Just recently they changed their IP scheme (used to be 4.x.x.x now it's 71.x.x.x) in my area as well as the behavior of their DHCP servers (MAC-based authorization). It's been a huge pain in my ass that I wasn't at all notified about. They've also been getting progressively slower over time and just recently (Saturday) they had an unexplained 5-hour outage in the 425 area code (the *entire* area code). However, I am at the outer limits of DSL's coverage range and any number of factors could be affecting my own personal experiences.
Comcast is running a special right now, first 5 months for $29.99 each month (This makes it the same price as Verizon) if you're a current Comcast subscriber. It's $10/month extra for "naked cable internet" as it were. That's the nice thing about Comcast: they'll give you what you want, for a price, while Verizon is just not about making people happy.
I say that they're not about making people happy because I spent 35 minutes on hold while waiting to talk to somebody about their nullroute problem. They play a "helpful tips" message over and over again, no hold music, and a "your call is important, you're in a queue, yadda yadda" message, looped as well. There's a pause between the voice offering tips and when it plays the first tip, lulling you into some kind of false sense of security, as if it's picking a random tip to share. Nope, it's the same stupid tips, over and over. ("unplugging and restarting your DSL modem can fix most DSL problems!") I really wish they'd just give me some hold music and an option to press 1 for some quick tips if I want them. But you see, Verizon isn't about choices, which is why they like locking people into the "you need basic phone service to get DSL" thing. They don't like people having options, they like to dictate what people can and can't do. I say fuck 'em, if they're gonna be like that.
Tangentially, I wonder how much latent anger towards women is generated by these automated female voices that do nothing other than frustrate and irritate us? I would prefer an obviously-synthesized robotic voice over a trying-to-sound-human voice. I hate those machines
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Speakeasy had this first, branding it Onelink. I think they rolled it out in September. Note too, if you only have one copper pair (some places have this), it complicates things a little bit - you'll have to come in with a VoIP line already established, forward your old phone number to the VoIP, and when the DSL is ready to hook up, instruct the tech to make the switch at the punch board. At your option, you either shuck the old number, keep it, or arrange for a transfer, which *might* involve a new VoIP account (and all the logistics thereunto related).
This sig no verb.
I've had both Adelphia cable and Verizon DSL for the last few years. DSL has been *way* more reliable. It's faster too, because Adelphia's network is so bogged. But for the last year I've had cable because I didn't want to pay an extra $20/month for a land line I didn't need (I use my cell phone, also Verizon, for all my calls.) It looks like now I can switch back. I wonder when naked DSL is coming to the mid-Atlantic.
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.
Guys, I live in Maryland. Is that included in the naked DSL?
More generally, how can we lookup exactly what's covered? (Their website asks for a phone number, but I don't have a landline by virtue of being in the market for naked dsl!)
Same here. One of the reasons I haven't switched to DSL from cable was price. True, DSL is only $30 a month, but you had to have an existing phone line which can range from $30 - $50 depending on fees and extras. But like many people, I haven't owned a telephone in years. I only have a cell phone.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For download speed, cable is tough to beat - ComCast currently offers 3 mbits, and I think they're moving up to 4 mbits - and even 6 mbits if you pay a little extra.
The downside of Comcast is the upload speed - 384 kbits. That's more than plenty for surfing, email, gaming, etc., but if you do large uploads (I regularly sync up large file repositories between home and an office server), then a DSL offering can get the nod - IF you get a service level with a reasonably higher upload speed.
All in all, nearly everyone I know (including gamers) prefer ComCast - but those with DSL from a company with decent uptime and network connectivity are rarely saddened that they don't have cable. Those with DSL from a shoddy company quickly end up switching.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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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I'm in Cambridge MA. I just phoned them four times. Responses:
1. anger: you can't have DSL without local phone!
2. oh, you want to buy our VoiceWing product (VOIP)
3. call transferred to dead-end
4. admits that she hasn't heard of it yet, and none of her co-workers have either, but that I'm not the first to call about it. She wanted to know where I heard about it, so I read her an AP news clipping.
So I guess we'll have to wait a while until they get their act together.
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.
For this to make any difference. My old house was only 3000 feet from a remote DSLAM. I'm now over 21000 feet from the closest DSLAM. Verizon will give me service, and gladly take my money for it, but they advised me that my speeds would be pretty sad for DSL.
I just use my wrt54g, and it works like a charm.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent