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."

Comments

What a shame

[Svippy]

I was hoping now I could believe to surf naked without me feeling ashamed. :(

I still have to live with the suffering, it seems.

Re:What a shame

[Valiss]

Yeah, well, I bet others would suffer less if you turned off the webcam. =]

About Time

[Cheirdal]

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.

Re:About Time

[joe_bruin]

I remember having had an apartment in (the slums of) Beverly Hills, and having to apply for LifeLine phone service so I could get my DSL. A LifeLine is the most basic phone service you can get, for about ten dollars per month, but there's a maximum income limit. It was interesting telling the lady on the phone that my zip code is 90210, and then swearing that I make under $10,000/year to qualify for the LifeLine, and then adding DSL onto that.

Wow

[jim_v2000]

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)

Commercials....

[JazzyJ]

Is Verizon actually calling it "Naked DSL"?

If they are...can't wait to see the commercials for it.

Re:Commercials....

[Rob Riggs]

Can you see me now?

Good!

Ahh...

[Delta2.0]

Verizon's DSL Gets Naked

Put that back on, I don't want to see that!!!

Verizon's FIOS Even Better

[MBraynard]

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.

Good, now ignore local monopolies.

[DarkSarin]

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).

Re:US is ahead

[Kiryat Malachi]

Part of the reasoning behind choosing -48VDC as the line voltage was, in fact, to help prevent oxidation of buried lines.

I'm not making it up either. There's a lot of funky shit in the telco systems, but some of it is for very good reason.

Importance

[fm6]

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.

Re:Okay, quick question then:

[UWC]

DNS Servers (is that redundant?)

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.

Re:Okay, quick question then:

[MaineCoon]

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.