I'm not sure how Sympatico works it but with Rogers@Home you can purchase IP's from them for either $5 or $10 dollars, it's not free but it's still cheaper than getting ISDN and several IP's.:)
The $50/mo. is a welcome rate for somewhat decent bandwidth now only if we can as paying customers can hold both Bell Sympatico and Rogers@Home accountable to some sort of level of service. I've had intermittent 'Net access for approximately 3 weeks with most of my weekends without 'Net access. Now and either the outage isn't recorded or Rogers@Home 1-800 number is busy. The problem with traditional carriers is that they think a small outage won't upset too many people. Face it, Rogers and Sympatico haven't engineered their services properly to handle the customer base and are so busy fighting fires they can't re-engineer any of their infrastructure, (I've heard of people that have their @Home e-mail accounts in B.C when they are based in Ontario). The CRTC should step in and do something about it, I'm not sure making it an essential service is the answer but it's a step in the right direction.
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I'm not sure how Sympatico works it but with Rogers@Home you can purchase IP's from them for either $5 or $10 dollars, it's not free but it's still cheaper than getting ISDN and several IP's. :)
The $50/mo. is a welcome rate for somewhat decent bandwidth now only if we can as paying customers can hold both Bell Sympatico and Rogers@Home accountable to some sort of level of service. I've had intermittent 'Net access for approximately 3 weeks with most of my weekends without 'Net access. Now and either the outage isn't recorded or Rogers@Home 1-800 number is busy. The problem with traditional carriers is that they think a small outage won't upset too many people. Face it, Rogers and Sympatico haven't engineered their services properly to handle the customer base and are so busy fighting fires they can't re-engineer any of their infrastructure, (I've heard of people that have their @Home e-mail accounts in B.C when they are based in Ontario). The CRTC should step in and do something about it, I'm not sure making it an essential service is the answer but it's a step in the right direction.