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The Internet

Thoughts On Third-Party DSL Providers? 293

Posted by Cliff from the looking-for-experiences dept.
drut asks: "Due to a power surge last week, I lost my link at home. As a result of this, I've learned the frustrating truth of how my DSL provider processes its work orders that have to deal when the actual DSL line is involved. My provider, Flashcom, works with Covad and Bell Atlantic to give me Internet access. Due to legal issues involved in the ownership of the physical phone lines, I spent a week just having them go through the red tape of contacting one company, having them issue a work order with another company, then having the second company issue a work order with the third company, making me three times removed from the problem. Because of this system, no one at the first (Flashcom) or second (Covad) companies have any idea of the status of the problem, and don't have any contact information for the third company (Bell Atlantic). With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies. " Has anyone else had problems like this?
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Thoughts on Third-Party DSL Providers? More

Thoughts on Third-Party DSL Providers?

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  • Our friendly Telco monopoly here in South Africa has deemed DSL an illegal technology. We have imported two DSL modems and use them to link our two offices but we have to hide them whenever the telco engineers are about. A third party DSL provider would be great.
  • It seems very poor form that the company from whom you get your service, doesn't keep you in anyway informed about the status of your connection.
    Even if they source it from somebodyelse, that isn't YOUR problem. These are the basics of a service industry.
    I personally haven't got a problem paying a little extra for a good service, and wouldn't hesitate to drop a provider if they didn't provide the desired service.

    ys
  • I used to work for an ISP and customers that had line problems didn't usually take that long. While we did have to go through Bell it only took a short time to diagnose it as a line problem. We would then contact Bell and they would issue us a trouble ticket. They would usually send someone within 2-8 hours (depending on time of day). I imagine Bell's own ISP would probably go through the same channels (though they would probably get higher priority over a small ISP). As for Cable Modem I have @home. Their connection is usually pretty fast, but I seem to get intermitent service late a night sometimes (3-4 in the morning). Never had any long term problems though.
  • speaking for the ISP who provids DSL lines for 5years here in vienna. it works like this: we rent the leased line (bare copper) from the austrian telekom and operate the DSL on top. the customers pays directly the bare line and aditional fee to the ISP for the international traffic. when a line is down we inform the telekom who owns the line. but in principle the customer (since he has the number of the line and he pays for it) can directly call the telekom as well.


    so i would suggest you try to get the contact information for the owner of the line as well and find out your line number. then you can directly call the owener of the line to fix it.... you just should make sure that it is really a problem with the line. but you see on your DSL when the physical link is broken. after contacting the primary provider and ask if the other end is OK then the physical line can be the only problem.. greetings mond.

  • Due to the nature of my work, it is imperative that I have a very fast connection at home.

    When I contacted AT&T, they said that they hadn't gotten around to installing digital cable for internet access in my area yet, but that they would do so probably by the end of July. I wasn't thrilled with this prospect, since I spent almost seven months in my previous residence in Portland, Oregon where I would be told it was available in my area one day and that it was still a mile away the next. I gave up after half a year.

    PacificBell claims that there is absolutely no way I can get DSL in my area at this time and that they have absolutely no idea when or if I'll ever be able to.

    Now, keep in mind, I live in the absolute heart of the Silicon Valley. A short drive from everything from Netscape and Sun to 3COM, HP, Apple, Cisco... In fact, I am within walking distance of Covad at this very moment. Yet for the life of me, I can't get anything beyond a 56k dial-up account.

    Someone recently reccomended I look at Covad, but having just spent this evening browsing their site, I'm not quite sure how they fit into the picture. Is my phone company still involved? Does this mean I have to deal with Covad (they provide the DSL lines, perhaps?), my ISP and the phone company? Wow. Talk about beauracracy. For $90, plus tax, I can get 144kbps bi-directional DSL from some area DSL providers, according to links I found from Covad (But I'm not sure if this $90 is just the fee for the ISP or if it includes the DSL line, too? how does Covad get paid on this?). Unfortunately, higher speed seems to be impossible since I'm slightly over 20,000 feet from the main switches.

    I'd really like to know what some experiences are with Covad and some DSL providers as I don't have much choice where I am and I'd be interested to know what process, what fees and what kudos or rants anyone may have with specific relation to Covad (and how they fit into my actual physical DSL and my ISP). Perhaps much of this is RTFM, but I kinda gave up on their site for the evening and moved on until tomorrow when I have more energy.
    ---
    icq:2057699
    seumas.com

  • Yeah - be thankfull you don't live in South Africa - it took 10 weeks to install a simple 64k leased line in our offices - we have no DSL options, or cable options at present. Our Telecommunications Monopoly is holding South Africa back big time - still another 2 years to go before the Monopoly comes to an end. Count yourself lucky you have these kinds of services. Even getting a normal home telephone installed here can take over a month !
  • I, too, had Covad as a line provider a couple of years back (Epoch was the ISP, PacBell was the ones that actually owned the physical lines into my house).

    Not only do they have an unfair advantage when competing with PacBell (in price, as well as complexity); they also appear as the "Bad Guys" in front of the customers.

    In this regard, they are not that much different from long distance companies. Various charges that are levied against them from local telephone Co's are showing up in your long distance bill.

    The moral of this story is that monopolies are evil and they should be destroyed. Penguins are OK.
  • Iv had just about the same problem or similar problem in San Diego. We have had great service from our local isp and decided to take them up on the DSL offer. They contract everything out to a third party, several companies/contracts/service providers later, you get to Pac Bell, Once they give you a clean pair, not telling if any of the diffrent people you have to deal with along the way have any idea on what they are supposed to do. We have seen several confused faces run around the house, pull apart phone jacks, then just bail and schedule work from another company. I would like to stay with my local ISP, but it looks like if you use the telco all the way atleast you work with one company. Most of the ISP's dont seem to offer much better pricing for service might as well just suck it up and stick with your local baby bell. I does leave a bad taste in mouth to see this them control this so well, while other companies have such a hard time to compete.
  • I'm a local ISP provider in Oregon (in a small town) and we were aproached by a DSL provider. I/we felt it would be a bad idea just for the reasons you talked about. We would have no access to server information and when the fit hits the shan, we'd be lost. 7
  • From a brief look at the details - it seems Flashcom is just a reseller of Covad, so while you are a customer of Flashcom, they are customers of Covad. Unfortently, while this gives Covad a good 'sales team' (Flashcom et al will be trying to sell as many as possible) - it does make support difficult as problems need to be referred to the actual provider - ie Covad.

    The phone line, however, is a slightly different beast at it is provided by Bell Atlantic as they are the 'telco' and Covad is the ISP. Bell Atlantic won't have any provision for connecting you to the internet (except if they have their own ISP division) and are just concerned with selling a high speed line to connect X to Y.

    It seems as if Flashcom purchased your DSL system off their provider (Covad) who then purchased the physical line connecting you to them from Bell Atlantic. If it was just a problem with your ISP connection, then it could have been dealt with Flashcom - who would have referred major problems to Covad to see if it was their end.

    Yep, it can be problematic, but that's the way companies work - all around the world (for example, Beebware Internet [beebware.com] is a reseller of ConnectFree which is a VISP of Telinco. I deal with front-line support to Bebeware, but major problems get referred to ConnectFree who refer them to Telinco. I'm prevented to going direct to Telinco because of the contract I signed. It gets annoying for the companies as well sometimes) :(


    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --
  • I, too, am also a Flashcom customer, but as I live in Calif. my telco is PacBell. During the eight months I've had my connection, I've had the following problems:

    Delay: It required over four weeks from my order placement to installation. This may be better now, but knowing PacBell, I doubt it.

    Improper installation: The PacBell technician screwed up my installation, and my voice line was down for two days. Two calls to two different PacBell numbers were needed to fix the problem.

    Emergency IP number change: This was the big one. I was without service for 72 hours due to an "emergency" IP number change PacBell forced on Flashcom. I've had other outages, but probably none more than 12 hours long. These turned out to be Flashcom-related, mostly with routers going down. February was awful and I almost cancelled, but I can't remember an outage since March. I did have a line problem in April but that disappeared mysteriously. (Probably just mice in the line.)

    Tech support: Forget contacting Flashcom during business hours on Monday. I've been on hold for four hours before and gotten no response. However, I did get instant response during off hours and even once during a non-Monday weekday.

    PacBell sucks. I used to live in a BellSouth area and got much cheaper service calls and 24/7 tech and customer service. PacBell probably has more customers (just a guess based on coverage) and forget calling them at night or early in the morning. They just aren't there.

    Overall I'd have to say I'm fairly happy with Flashcom, but they are handicapped by some really stupid local telcos. I also hear they're one of the best DSL providers, so YMMV (probably downward). The people I know with cable modem are happier than I am, I think, since it's a bit cheaper, and I'm not sure my connection speed is any better than theirs when taking a time average.

  • My DSL line is provided by a small ISP in my town. USWurst(USWest) does not yet provide DSL to my town, and probably never will, so I lease a latta circuit directly to the ISP. It works great, but last time something went wrong, it took USWurst a week to figure out who technically owned/controlled the line. (them or my ISP) having a fast connection, then having it go dead for a week really sucks. As soon as my contract is up, i'm thinking of going with a wireless connection.. I hate dealing with USWurst

    ------------------------------------------
    If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
  • I have used PacBell DSL for a year now, as well as several friends with their multi-IP setup hosting small personal web-sites.
    IMHO, you have little to gain from going to a third party provider, as the DSL link is little more than an IP address, and the physical wire.
    PacBell basically rips you off, by providing a 3MB mail account, and a 3MB web-site for the $10/mo that they charge you, but it's clear that they own the pipe, and leave little if any room for a third party to get involved in the DSL $$$ action

    Get realistic here: Even though they're a monopoly, they are providing a service not too different from regular phone service. You pay them for the pipe, and if you want fancy news-server access (think: long distance carrier / other value added voice-phone services), you pay them the mandatory $10 for it.
  • "Telco monopoly here in South Africa has deemed DSL an illegal technology"

    Oh man,. that's just nuts. What's next? Touch Tone?

    :)

    7

  • The biggest problem with your situation is that the company you get the service threw does not have direct comunication with the company who owns the sub system.

    The company I work for, downcity [downcity.net], is making sure that we have very good comunications with the company we connect to up stream and actually own the system.

    please excuse my grammar and spelling. I have been awake for less than 20 min.
    -----
    If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.
  • I go through Sprint (my telco) for my DSL. Service with them is wonderful. There's never been more than 3 days turnaround on any work order. "Let me put the phone down while I go over to the multiplexor." is a direct quote from my last tech support call. They don't support linux, but as long as you let them come in and install on a windows box, they don't care what you do from there. Just be sure to ask them for the DSL to Ethernet modem rather than the internal WinDevice solution.
  • Speaking as a network admin/engineer/monkey, this behaviour does not surprise me. Many times when we lose a T1 line, there's a problem getting the local telco (LEC) to respond in a timely manner. We can yell at the telco we actually bought the line from until we can't breathe, but we can do nothing to the local telcos except ask the main carrier to continue to escalate the issue with them. On the few occasions where we have directly contacted the LEC because of a problem isolated to their portion of the circuit, we've been rebuffed since we're not the main carrier company. This sort of behaviour is perfectly normal for a local telco. If I had to go with DSL, I'd either go with a company I worked for, or directly from the local telco to make service calls less of a problem.
  • I get my dsl line through GTE and use a different ISP as my service provider. It was a bitch and a half to get working correctly, although its been nearly flawless since I got it going.

    The big issue is that GTE and my ISP can't possibly isolate a problem without having a conference call to discuss it. GTE will check all their settings and everything will be correct. My ISP will check all their settings and everything will be correct. The fact that my ISP was using the wrong settings but thought they were right will not be discovered until the two companies talk. Of course, I need to be on the line at the same time to assure that whatever they're doing to fix it actually fixes it. Otherwise there's a 2 day long behind the scenes battle before telling me they fixed the problem, with no change in service.

    This really isn't a big problem, as I said.. once it started working, it stayed working without additional assistance. But GTE isn't exactly well known for stability and I'm really shocked that it has worked as well as it has, and I can't help but worry that sometime in the future (before I move) they will do something silly to change all that and my stability so far will go down the drain and I will require lengthy phone conversations, lots of hold time during hours I normally sleep. Can't wait.

    -Restil

  • Problems with Bell Atlantic ADSL (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but potential Bell Atlantic ADSL customers will thank me... I would think twice before going straight to the phone company for ADSL (BA Infospeed). I've gone through the tortureous process of having Bell Atlantic set up my ADSL account simply because no other provider offers it in my location. The account was originally started three months ago and the circuit has only been *operating* for 5 weeks total. The rest has been downtime. The simple fact is, Bell Atlantic doesn't give a about residential customers when it comes to data lines. I've spoken to over 15 BA technicians from Tier 1 up to Tier 3, been promised return phone calls at least a dozen times out of which NONE were actually returned. IF you can't call between 5:30AM and 6:00AM be prepared to wait at least 2 hours on hold; and thats just to speak to a Tier 1 technician who is prohibited from doing anything but following a checklist for your Windows 98 configuration (is DHCP enabled; is DNS disabled; is WINS disabled; etc... ad nauseum). Of course ANY other operating system including Linux, Win2000 or NT is completely unsupported. Be prepared since you HAVE to go through this checklist EVERY time you call regardless of what you tell the technician. There's a minimum of another hour on hold to speak to Tier 2 should this checklist fail. Oh, and you cannot be transferred to a Tier 2 technician without the explicit approval of the manager of the Tier 1 tech. This approval takes approximately 30 to 45 minutes. All this because they deleted my profile and had to recreate it; a process, I was told by the Tier 2 tech, that takes no more than 5 minutes to correct. Of course this horrendous tech support might only affect the mid-atlantic region, but who knows. I've actually spoken to several other BA ADSL customers in my area who have had the same problems repeatedly. To make a long story short, stay away from Bell Atlantic ADSL. While you may not like having three companies to deal with, the seperate tiers of techinicians at BA operate in the same way; they are in different buildings (actually different states) and never talk to each other regarding your problem except when they transfer you back and forth on the phone, nor can they find out what the other technicians are doing. The rest is trouble tickets getting passed back and forth. There is no worse feeling than spending over 40 hours on hold and waiting several weeks for a fix that is supposed to take 5 minutes... But then again, getting 178KB p/sec on downloads is pretty cool now that it works.

  • DSL isn't all that great (Score:4)

    by 348 ( 124012 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @01:45AM (#1038754) Homepage
    With DSL access routing through sometimes many switches and tpp's it's sometimes amazing yoiu can get service at all. Most are local resellers with carrier agreements with the RBOC's and use a hodge podge of equipment that seriously comprimizes reliability and security.

    With the ones I have been involved with from an engineering and implementation standpoint they mostly used a redback switch as the main engine and in very cludgy ways wired in the authentication systems such as Radius. Most of the tpp are also selling batter and ground for local loop service that adds to the complication and because of this they don't own any repeaters because the costs are to high to integrate the DSL repeater with the local loop. This rsults in only getting access within a couple of miles of the CoLo. Anything further is done through resale agreements with still other DSL providers.

    I finally had enough in my Bell Atlantic service area and went with a cable modem instead. So far service has been great the speeds are more than fast enough and as long as you secure your box in a reasonable manner it seems to be pretty secure. I get the service for about $34 a month and have wired all the workstations in the house through the one cable modem and this turned out to be much cheaper than the DSL service and with the exception of one outage when a telephone pole was hit near my house, service has been 100%.

  • I had a problem with the electric company not doing their job a few years ago. They were supposed to do something called a "heavy up" on my lines. I was told that it might take a year to get this done by my electrician, so I was prepared to be patient. After three years of just getting the brushoff from the contact at the electric company, I wrote a letter to the Public Service Commission with my complaint. The electric company then completed the job within a week. Lesson: Monopolies bad-regulators good.

    Bell Atlantic is well known for blocking competition in ways very similar to what you are describing, that is, not cooperating in a timely manner with third parties. Bell Atlantic is trying to expand into other areas. The regulators are using that as a wedge to open up competition by Bell Atlantic (according to newspaper articles about the issue).

    If you have cable TV and your provider offers internet access then you could switch. But cable companies traditionally have a lot of complaints about their service as well. I am not sure you would be better off.

  • Hey - that's how it goes. Provider points at carrier. Carrier says "there's nothing wrong here - check provider." Provider says "there's nothing wrong here - check carrier." And in the mean time Bell Atlantic [oops - I mean the carrier :-] has fixed the "non-existant" problem, and the provider says "hey - there's no problem here - you're nuts!"

    It's happened time and time again. I'm in the financial markets, and the rule is that we don't accept line installs before 4:30PM EST (until the major markets are closed). I've had Bell Atlantic agents yell at me when I refused them early entry. In general, most RBOCs are terrible, from a professional standpoint and an ethical standpoint.

    But we all still pay our monthly phone bill...

  • Bell Atlantic DSL.... (Score:3)

    by BKuhl ( 2470 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @01:49AM (#1038757)
    I have the Bell Atlantic's DSL and I'm sorry to say that they are not any better. If you have any type of problem, they take your call assign a ticket number and then tell you "If your problem persists in three days call us back and open a new ticket."
    They used to call you back and let you know the status, or call the CO directly for updates for you but in the last several months they have eliminated that. Now, you just wait.
    I have had DSL for close to 18 months from Bell Atlantic. Originally there product was based on static IP addresses and recently they have moved to DHCP and the PPPOE standard. When I made some changes to my account at the end of March, they needed to convert me to the new standard. I was given April 6th as a new activation date with the new setup, which was about 2.5 weeks from when I called the changes in. SIX weeks later, they finally got my account functional and it took CONSTANT calls to support from me and hours on the phone.
    To make matters worse, up to recently you could wait 1 hour to get through to the first tier support. After they found that they could not help you, you would wait another hour for the second tier of support. I have to admit that has gotten much better recently.
    In summary, stay away from Bell Atlantic at all costs. You would think that they would be able to handle difficulties more quickly, but I think it is better to have a third party fight your battles for you. If you have lots of free time and a hands free phone maybe you won't mind.

    -BKuhl
  • I'm with Pacbell at home and Covad through Internet Connect at work. The work situation is better and faster all around. The problem is two fold, first Flashcom....... nuff said. (Don't want the guys here to get any more nasty grams telling them to remove comments *sigh*) Second PacBell, the response time you got is almost Identical to the response time we get operating straight from PacBell. I've been arguing with them for a while because what the say we are getting (784 up and 1.5 down) isn't what even THIER people test our line speed at (256 up and 784 down) However because our distance from the DCO says we should get the higher speed they still want to charge us for the higher speed. Until now I've gone from disatisfied to totally appalled at how far behind the rest of the Telco's PacBell seems to be. Then to make it worse I've found out that I could have gone to CompUSA bought an INTERNAL DSL modem for our firewall, installed it myself and had DSL in a week at the same speed for only 49.95 a month. arrrrgggghhh. In short, Don't blame the problem on anything other that since you're in Silicon Valley where everybody and his sister are out to get rich of all of us DotCom millionares (yeah right) Sorry but the truth is that the desire for broadband internet exceeds the ability of any of these organizations to implement it. Also the laws for right of way and easement for laying the lines are still out of the early 1900's and designed for Gov controlled monapolies, not the best situation for what is needed these days. The best thing I can tell you is be calm, polite and friendly on the phone(everyone else yells at them so that makes you someone they want to help) second when they tell you it can't be done, begging is a viable option. It's degrading but it works. If you've been nice up to that point I've found that things "magically" happen that weren't happening before. Finally don't be afraid to bug them a little calling everyday if needed. It got my six week install date moved up 5 weeks!, and I deal with much of the same people. Also complaining about how much money it's costing you won't hurt either.

  • Re:Good Timing - Covad Experiences Anyone? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Going through third party DSL providers works like this. Covad (or Northpoint or NAS) pay the RBOC to keep their DSLAM and other equipment in the RBOC Central Office near you. Pac Bell says you can't get it because they haven't put their own DSL equipment in the CO yet. If this equipment is not already there, you have to wait for them to set it up (thats why they tell you it will take x months; they plan out exactly when each CO will get the equipment installed) or find a provider that already has equipment in that CO. After they have the RBOC techs test the line to your location, they don't really have to go through the telco for anything else (except to get into the CO when something breaks). So you only have to go through one company for problems since Covad or whoever actually owns and operates the equipment in the CO. They are also your ISP, all for that $90 charge (at least that how it works over here on the east coast). Beware, even though they say you can get 144Kbps you may not get it; it depends on the line when they test it at the installation date. At 20000 ft you are very close to the outer limit, when we sign up DSL customers over 20000 they usually end up with IDSL (ISDN DSL) which is 128Kbps over long distances, but operates the same as SDSL. We usually use NAS (Network Access Solutions I think) and have had very good results with the SDSL lines. As far as I've heard Covad is good too. Hope this helps.
  • The same thing happened to me and is still happeining today to a friend of mine here in the DC suburbs.

    I ordered service from Speakeasy (because of thier friendly service agreements). Speakeasy ordered DSL from Covad. Covad ordered a line from Bell Atlantic. BA missed their first two appointments to set up my line. Eventually, after about three weeks of delays, they got around to it.

    At the same time, my brother ordered DSL directly from BA. His line was in the same week. Who could have predicted that?

    BA was sued in NY for this and settled out of court. Since then, my friend (who also ordered service through Speakeasy) is still waiting. BA has missed three appointments, and when they did finally showed up, screwed it up. Details, suprisingly, are hard to come by. So, two months later, he is back to square one.

    BA's intentions and incentives are not hard to figure out. I suppose that the NY settlement only obligated BA to equitably service customers in NY. We might have to take them to court in every state they operate in... More lawyers making money...

    - jeff -

    P.S. With a lot of DSL companies, you own the DSL modem. Your ISP, Covad, and BA (or equiv.) have no obligation when lightning or power surges fry your modem. Remember to install line and power spike supressors on your DSL equipment.

  • I'm a Flashcom user myself, but (Score:4)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @02:00AM (#1038761) Homepage Journal
    They have an utterly horrid reputation among the DSL community of being unresponsive, delay-prone, and having billing problems galore, among others. I think it's a matter of trying to be too big, too fast. That said, I'm a happy customer because:

    (a) I only use them for my home pipe and DNS - I provide my own mail and web server. Unless I'm down, I only have to contact hostmaster if I create a new host entry. Other than one outage in August that lasted about a day, I haven't had any reason to contact support or billing since I got the service last spring.

    (b) When I got the router, I configured it myself and they don't even have the password. So if I want to cange something I don't have to wait for them.

    The way DSL installs work is that the DSL provider (several companies like Covad or, in my case, Northpoint) leases the UNE (Unbundled Network Elements or, in this case, the copper loop itself) from the ILEC. They pay around $8/month for this. Covad provides the DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexer) in your CO, too. They partition it into several VPN's, one for each ISP that they work with at that CO. Flashcom is just one of the ISP's that works with Covad in your area - they provide the "value-added" services of email (outsourced, but I don't remember who), web hosting, Usenet (outsourced to Supernews), billing, etc. Most of the DSL ISP's, ironically, outsource in turn virtually all of their operation but the billing and DNS.

    In fact, here in Massachusetts many of Bell Atlantic's Infospeed DSL customers are actually wholesale customers - serviced through a different ISP.

    The biggest problem for DSL service is this: DSL is a non-tariffed service (unlike, say, POTS, ISDN or T-1). There's no service guarantee associated with it, and if it's out there's no grounds for you to report anyone to your state's DPU. If your ISP is unresponsive, that's a problem in getting the wholesaler notified properly. If the wholesaler and ILEC are on bad terms (Covad has a reputation here for a fairly adversarial relationship with BA), then the ILEC may "misplace" service requests for a while - that's just how they are. For $8/month, the ILEC generally isn't too motivated to help out.

    One thing that can help is to cultivate a good relationship with the local ILEC techs if you have the opportunity. Who works on what at a CO is rigidly determined by rules (ILEC techs are not allowed to touch stuff belonging to their co-located CLEC's), but if one of the techs is friendly with you, they may just take care of the problem if they happen to hear about it. Easy fixes can happen that way.

    As far as the CPE, you own that - though Flashcom bought it. Your contract paid for it. If it's burned out, you should be able to contact the manufacturer yourself and get it replaced. Or you can settle the matter by buying another one - DSL routers are getting cheap. Good luck either way.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • I once thought about getting Flashcom. Do a search on Slashdot for Flashcom, and you'll see why I didn't
    I have NEVER in my life seen a company as small and as new as Flashcom rack up so many complaints in such a short time. The horror tales of being unable to get anyone on the phone (except for salespeople) for weeks at a time would have been enough to scare me off if there hadn't been the ridiculous long contracts they want you to sign - and the "random billing" of credit cards that Flashcom is known for.
    I have a moral issue with using phone companies for ISP's. Here in Arizona, US West is busy letting rural telephone customers languish in a limbo of bad service, long repair delays, and frequent outages - while at the same time they throw tons of money upgrading the infrastructure in the cities. Yeah, that's where the money is, but they ARE a monopoly - we theoretically have competition for telcos in AZ but in practice very few companies survive the barrage of lawsuits US West files to anyone who dares to enter the market. This could be why they're being sued by class action lawsuits in both Denver and Arizona.
    US West has unlimited phone lines, and undercuts regular ISP's by about 50% (US West Internet is about $10-$15/ month for dial up). Their DSL service is not bad, but it bothers me to give them more power.
    Dancris Internet in Phoenix is pretty good - one nice thing about them is that if there's a problem with the DSL line, they'll call the phone company up and argue with them so that you don't have to.
    I guess this has been kind of rambling, but the point is, don't judge DSL ISP's by Flashcom's behavior - if you do the research, you'll see that Flashcom is not really a reputable company.
  • Telkom bashing time! :) It was news to me that DSL was illegal in SA? Telkom's Diginet is completley useless. Damn bloody government granting Telkom exculsive monopoly until 2002. SATRA are toothless poodles. They just managed to screw up 3rd cellular licence process...
  • Frankly, Id say this in a problem with Flashcom. I tried in Jan of '99 to have them put in a DSL line to my house. 8 months later (consisting of phone calls, ignorals, refusals, and fingerpointing) I canceled and called Rhythms. 2 months later I had my DSL line.
  • And I still am having line problems with my DSL. You got to get on your provider so they can get on their provider who will get on the local Telco. Local Telco normally could care less, I tell them to just get on the pole nowadays no being nice, chatting etc. I would say complain to your PUC, but that is probably all former executives from your Local Telco...... :-

  • I also have alot of problems with BA DSL. I did do some research before signing up but almost ended up changing my mind. a few things, as with the orginal post sorry about the length.

    • BA in the southern region is more together then the north(formerly NYNEX) where I am. So depending where you are your mileage may vary.
    • The first few teirs of tech support is farmed out to the rocket scientists as Comp-Usa. As such tech support is nearly non existant. The people who can actually fix problems are only in m-f 9/5 and are VERY busy. Tech support will tell you 48 hours, this is something they are not supposed to do. 48 business hours is a good guess for small problems but expect longer.
    • Expect problems. Here is my list so far
      • 1st setup caused me to lose dial tone for a week. because I was changing from digtal dialtone(AML) back to a single analog line to handle dsl the botched the install and no one at BA would take responsablitly for the problem. After 3 hours on the phone with 6 departments they hung up on me.
      • the 2nd time around the botched the install and had setup bridged ethernet instead of PPPOE which I had the equipment for. It took me 5 weeks to get this resovled with presidential support.
      • Since march the service has been down 4 times usually for 1-4 days. best bet is to get a ticket in and then just wait. after 2 days contact presidential support.
      • In the nynex region there is no dialup backup regardless of what the web page says make sure you have at least a free isp backup.
    • Third party in the nynex region is doomed. Earthlink actually pulled out of nyc with DSL because of the terrible support provided by BA. At least when your a BA direct customer for DSL and local you have a hammer to wrap on presidential supports door as a third party customer there is nothing BA is worried about.
    • Presidential support is your friend if your a direct customer. If you have a reall problem after talking to the managers at tech support(ie you must make an effort before calling) the people there are very helpful. While they may not get done things done faster they will harass the DSL people for you and call you back.
    • When the line is up it works well though you get less for the money compared to other providers.
    • If things are real bad(and your again a direct customer) ask for a few free months(I got 9) but not upgraded service, they have a fixed fee/speed with the FCC due to the third parties and cannot upgrade the service for less then the listed price.(I wanted 2nd level speed at 1st level price as long as I was willing to put up with them. while they were willing they could not legally do so).
  • $90 seems fairly steep for 144kbps or even 128kbps, but it's better than being stuck at sub-56k. My apartment complex offers dual-ISDN hook-ups, but who wants to pay for (as I understand it) two phonelines, an ISP and a per-minute fee? Even at fractions of a penny per-connection-minute, I'd go broke.

    It sounds like even if at 20,000+ feet, if I can get reliable 128k (or around there), it may be my best bet, to beat out the per-minute rate of ISDN.

    Thanks.
    ---
    icq:2057699
    seumas.com

  • What NOC_Monkey Thinks of COVAD! http://www.technolust.cx/coredump/work/PDC_0672.jp g http://www.technolust.cx/coredump/work/PDC_0325.jp g He He
  • We have had similar experience with Ameritech here in the mid-west. I was a partner in an ISP, and having anything done on a T1 or ISDN line was a total pain because of slow response from Ameritech. Going through a major provider like Norlight or TCG helped. They seem to have enough clout with Ameritech to get a little better respons.

    Rumor even has it that Ameritech's service was so bad at one point that the public service commission was suing them.

    Our situation improved when Ameritech ended up placing a Litespan cabinet (basically a central office in a box) co-located inside our premis. Then we could just look at the box ourself and tell our T1 providers if there were any alarm lights.

    Thad

  • Most telcos seem to have their collective head where the sun don't exactly shine, doubly so when it comes to relatively new technology. Meanwhile, the cable companies are jumping on some really cool technology lately (cable modem, HDTV, etc.).

    Technology is cool.
  • Gee, I thought the US had no problems at all getting DSL or cable up and running, and that WE were having a hard time. I work at an ISP that, amongst other services, has been selling DSL for about two years. In Switzerland, Swisscom's monopoly is still very much intact. Swisscom is the company that was formed when the federal telco (and the only one we had back then), Telekom, was privatized. Competition on the telco market has only been allowed since around 98, and that's why most of the copper still belongs to Swisscom.

    So a client contacts us to get a line, we have Swisscom offer something and send their offer to the customer directly. The customer signs our contract as well as Swisscom's, and that's basically it. About a week or two from that moment, the line should be up and running. At least if you're not more than 8 km away from the next switch. When there are connectivity problems, you have a choice of calling us (and we will relay the problem to Swisscom if we didn't cause it) or Swisscom directly. Since every installed leased line has a serial number, and every Swisscom leased line contract includes a support number to call, the client is independent.

    It would still be safer to call us, because we can check if the problem's on our side. I've seen quite a few ISPs, and most of them have a similar setup. Some (the other one I work at, for example) have their own copper and therefore won't have to contract or outsource anywhere along the way.

    What's really scary is that Swisscom is thinking about offering DSL service through their own ISP, the blue window. They have the largest market share already, because they didn't play fair when they started. We pay for local calls, much more for long distance (anything above 10 km), and they were the first to get a "local rate at any distance" sort of ISP number. Figures, their mother company (Swisscom, remember) created this type of service specifically for them. Well, thousands of clients flocked to the new ISP and dozens of local ISPs died in an instant from the shock. Local ISPs couldn't even get such a super-special number until about two months later. blue window has been riding on that wave of customers since then... The world's not fair. But I digress..
  • Your main problem is using Flashcom. They have the reputation as one of the worst DSL providers in the country. Don't take this is flamebait or a troll but check out the reports on dslreports.com. I looked there before I got my DSL line. As far as dealing with 3rd party, I have lines through both Covad and Northpoint. I've had problems with both of them. I think it quite honestly is the nature of the beast at this point. DSL providers are horendously slammed with new orders and I fear that at some point they will need to put a moratorium on new orders and catch up any outstanding calls they have at this point.
  • I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies.

    Is this unfair? Yes it is. Is it illegal? Probably. Does anyone care? Doesn't seem to be. The phone companies are looking to take over the ISPs role, and DSL is just apart of the game. But I guess with everything going on in the pit of vipers that is the corporate world, is this all that important? I guess not. Anyway, I am stretching my NDA anyway. I do feel 31337 to have an issue that I can't comment on due to a NDA though.

  • Try Telocity. We (unfortunately) got BellSouth ADSL which has big problems. One of these problems is that they chose PPPoE or PPPoA(TM) as their protocols, so that Windows and Mac users could use their Dialup Adapters. Unfortunately, PPP is a connection based protocol, so the connection drops and the authentication server goes down lots (among other problems).

    Other people in town (town == Atlanta, BTW) also use PPPoX, and also have big problems, though many are better than the awful BellSouth. None of these people support *nix, either.

    A shining star in the whole area is Telocity. I have two friends now that have Telocity. A couple of days after BellSouth did the underlying phone testing and switching stuff (which took a while) Telocity had the DSL modem there and the service turned on. The DSL modem has a bunch of ports on it, so you can connect with your Ethernet port, USB port, parallel port, serial port, etc. It also comes with instructions on how to set your service up, on a nice little card that has three sections, from left to right: "Unix, Windows, Mac" I believe. You get a static IP address, and (from what I understand) if you move from any city to any other city that Telocity is in, you keep the same IP address. I thought that was cool. And there's no additional setup fee if you move. And the contract is month-to-month.

    Anyway, it seems like they are extremely knowledgeable and have very high-quality service as a result. Though you still have stupid BellX that has to do a lot of the work, they will do the hassling for you, and once it's set up they have superior infrastructure and support.

  • You should see the deal with cable... Ooo boy. Where do I start?

    Here's my little fiasco, time organized:

    January 28th: A line tech from AT&T comes to my apartment complex to adjust tv problems that were reported. He does standard operating procedure, adjusts the line amplifier of the cable. The non-standard, idiot thing to do in his case was that he amplified the *whole* line to the condominium. So when, in fact, he overamplified the line, he caused the sensitive modems in the whole building to lose connection.

    Throughout the next month, I made 14 (!) calls to AT&T for them to fix the problem. They missed two scheduled work orders during this time. Others called as well, which is probably why it took AT&T comparitively so little time to respond...

    February 28th: Finally, AT&T trucks come out to handle a line amplifier problem, after a month's outage. This inefficiency was due in part by the fact that AT&T has a very inefficient, decentralized system - they will not just send out a line tech even though they know you have a line problem. Every time I called, I told the support technician (even higher level 2 technicians) told me all they could do is schedule a work order for a regular tech (who can do only a normal check up, no line work).

    The current situation: I believe my line is still under/over amplified, or there is some other unknown problem that is causing a horrible line connection. Example of the crap I have to go through: My gateway ping is never lower than 100. This means I never get pings lower than 100. What's worse is that this factor of lag increases during the day (because of the load of the condominium and the surrounding area on the node) to about an average 350 (!)gateway ping. This is slower than AOL, folks. My bandwidth is still normal, though.

    This problem only started since Feb. 28th - that's why I believe it's a line problem. Later in the day, it is coupled with node overload - but it can not be solely node overload, because 350 ping is just too much for pure node overload. Since February 28th, I called AT&T 38(!!!) times to solve this problem. No go. This time, they either missed their work orders, or their techs that have come over have told me that they'd set up a line tech. None of the scheduled line techs came (they usually aren't, but these techs said they can make it so).

    If you are going to recommend me to other high speed services - don't. I have checked DSL providers in my area (despite that there's less bandwidth, I am willing to lose that in order to frag), and there are none close by. The closest one is tantalizingly 300 feet outside my range. Ug.

    The only thing I can get is IDSL (I believe) which is about 128 kilobits throughput (I can settle for low bandwidth but not that low). So cable is basically my only option.

    If only AT&T, the raging monopoly, would open its cable lines (which it is never going to) it would help problems of customers such as me...

    What can I say but "Oh well"?

    P.S. sorry for my crap writing style - it's 6:20 A.M. :)

  • I live in CA, and after reading newsgroups for a few weeks, I decided to go ahead and sign up for PacBell DSL service. Since they would provide everything from my fingertips to the backbone provider, I figured that if there was ever a problem, I would only have to deal with one entity to get a solution, right?

    WRONG!!!

    See PacBell (and I'm willing to bet any other phone company) doesn't just have one department that does DSL. In fact, it involves a total of four groups. There's actually six if you count the quality assurance and legal departments.

    Here's an example of what this so-called "unified" services is like:

    A month ago I started getting this problem where all of my downloads were timing out. I would get download speeds from 40-50KBps (from smaller sites) to upwards of 150KBps (from PacBell sites or major providers like download.com). The problem is that after a random amount of time, the transfer would abruptly stop and time out. This happened with all protocols. If I tried to download a file with a web browser, it would get maybe 10% then stop. If I tried FTP, it would get around 10% then stop. Same with IRC and ICQ. Small files had the same problem. If I loaded a web page with a large number of small images (like a menu or whatever), I could count on a few "X's" from failed image loads.

    So I called PacBell Interent (company #1). They provide my ISP services. They pinged me and verified I had a connection. End of service, please call the PCO and have them check your line. So I called the PCO (company #2). They manage the line from my house to the DSL modem on their board. They telnet or something to my modem and verify the upload/download settings are correct. They ask me to download a file from a specific website. Of course, it works. I immediately try from download.com and it fails. They explain that they aren't responsible for problems off their network. Please call the network center (company #3) to report poor service. So I call the network center and then ask me to run tracert a bunch of times and then ping the slower hops with increasing packet sizes. I relay the information and they tell me there's nothing wrong. Please call the order center and have them verify a line test was done. So I call the order center and they tell me that my line qualified for high-speed access (which means I should not only be able to get the speeds I am getting, but actually much faster if I was willing to pay more).

    At that point they referred me back to the ISP group to see if maybe I didn't understand what the problem was. After enough ranting, I got put in touch with some quality assurance group to see if they could resolve it. Eventually I told them that if it wasn't fixed, I was going to small claims court to file for a refund of the $200 modem and $50 DSL fee. That put me in touch with the legal department who basically said "fine, whatever, we'll believe it when we see the subpoena".

    Anyway...the point to all this is that don't think you are saving anything by going with a single company. DSL right now is a mess any way you look at it. If I could do it all over again, I would have stuck with my cable modem. Sure the speed was sometimes deplorable and there were outages practically every week...but at least with enough bitching you could get transferred up the tree to people who actually know something about the problem...instead of getting transferred to people whose only skill is giving me a phone number and passing the buck.

    - JoeShmoe
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • Here in Ontario, Canada, the only affordable DSL service for the individual is ADSL Lite. Initially it was only offered by Bell Sympatico, but after some good work by ISP's and the government regulators, it can now be offered by ISP's. I resisted switching ISP's especially to Sympatico after hearing lots of horror stories about mail problems, and other difficulties.

    By getting DSL service through my ISP, Trytel Internet, I achive the following.
    1. Mail that works
    2. News that works
    3. In my opinion, a faster backbone connection.
    4. Service 7 days a week.
    5. An IP address that doesn't change every few hours.
    6. A point of contact that knows how to deal with the telephone bureaucracy when something goes wrong.

    In summary I just have a better degree of comfort dealing with a smaller organization that will get things done on my behalf.
  • I would NEVER go with DSL. I am a Systems Administrator and I have to deal with Bell Atlantic all the time and there level of incompetence baffles me. Why would you chose a technology that ultimately relies on them? Apparently Cisco thinks this is a good move, because they are going after the DSL market. I would sell your Cisco stock if you have any. The Bells have ruined so many businesses. I have @home cable modem service and I am very satisified. I had my cable scheduled to be installed in the morning and the cable modem installed in the afternoon. You have to have the cable installed to use the cable modem. I was expecting delies or one of them not to show up and waiting a few more weeks, expecting better service than Bell Atlantic! I was totally surprised when they were installed correctly and on time. Did I mention that I scheduled it only about a week in advance? I have had the service for two months and no problems. This is entire senario would be completely impossible with any Bell company. The service is so much better that I predict DSL to fail and cable modem to suceed. If cable providers get into phone service it will only accelarate there downfall.
  • This is the way tho whole DSL and third party thing works but to understand you need to see the whole picture and the players. To get DSL you need the following:

    1. Line provisioner (phone company).
    2. DSLAM.
    3. Modem.
    4. ISP.

    Sometimes, as with 3rd party setups, there is another step that includes an installer.

    All ISP's that do DSL are dependent on the presence of the DSLAM which is usually, I said usually, provided by the telco. COVAD has been installing them in some places which is where they come in. Otherwise they simply broker the connection between the telco and the ISP.

    When something goes wrong the ISP usually gets the call and must go through COVAD to get resolution because their contract is with COVAD, not the telco.

    The setup for the ISP I work for, which is owned by the telco, only lacks the 3rd party step. The customer still calls us but we have set up a system by which any reseller of DSL (other ISPs or 3rd party folks) can submit trouble tickets on the line. If the telco has put the proper infrastructure in place then any 3rd party group can get information about the line. Only the telco knows about the line. COVAD merely handles any DSLAMs they may have installed themselves. If they simply pay to get access to the DSLAMS then it falls back ultimately on the telco.

    But the customer doesn't care. They want service and don't care who does the calling. Most likely each entity wishes they had more control over the situation, but the telcos still have the ultimate control. We all forget that modem connections used to have the same reliability that DSL has now. DSL is barely 3 now. It will get better and more wide spread as time goes on. Somedays mine is great, somedays it sucks. I give them more slack because I know how the technology works and everyone is working to make it better. The future depends on it round here where I work.

    Myxx
  • Go check www.dslreports.com before you get Telocity.

    As with any DSL provider, some people have problems and other people have great experiences. But Telocity has had their approval ratings take a nosedive over the past couple weeks so I think something might be going on . . .

    Then again, I could be wrong.

  • Having worked with both of the major DSL carriers, and with all of the Bells on the East, I can say that this is a real problem. Bell Atlantic has a 3 day window to just begin working on a DSL line if there are problems with it! That's 3 full days, not to mention the fact that it is often on day 2 or 3 of customer (you) downtime that the order would even reach bell! That means you are probably going to be down for a week.

    I some of my conversations with Covad employees, i've had them ask me, what problems I encountered with their service, maybe we should get a list of the issues, with people's names, and present it to them. They aren't totally to blame though.....

    Bell Atlantic originally signed an agreement saying that they would deliver lines to a length of 45,000 ft. They turned around and then told Covad, that they would only deliver lines to 18,000 ft, because they didn't want to pay for the repeaters in the lines! They had already signed an agreement, and now they decided they wouldn't go through with it.

    I think that we should begin some forum, so people can begin listing their problems for everyone to see. I would also like to see things that people did, that helped whenever they ran into problems. I would be willing to get a website going, if anyone is interested.
  • I know my folks had signed up for ADSL through Bell Atlantic where they live in central NJ. After working for about a month the link went down -- and after an entire month of talking to people on the phone and trying to convince them that it wasn't a problem with the computer, they finally had the line shut off. Two days later a bell tech came out to check the line, and had a fix in 10 minutes. Now they're looking into cable...
  • We've had some similar problems with our DSL provider (DSL.net) in terms of mixups/screwups with the telco (SNET) - and other problems. After a particularly bad week (several days of DSL outtages, a *big* screwup involving SNET, etc.) we started looking for other DSL providers. There aren't many. And after talking to some of their 'technical representatives', we discovered that in this area, there just don't seem to be many who know what they are doing.

    Right now we are putting up with our current DSL, warts and all, and hoping that in time, the industry will mature ...

    YS
  • I'm not sure if anyone has posted from the perspective of an insider, but I am an order specialist for Covad.

    I am a firm believer that Covad offers a very good product, not just because I work for them, but because once the customer is set up, you don't hear about outages or downtime like some other DSL providers.

    The order process is not as smooth as it could be due to the fact we rely on the ILEC (phone company) to install a new line at the customers site (line sharing is coming soon). The ILEC seems to treat us like kicking dogs due to the fact that we hurt their precious monopoly (and they lost in court over and over ;). Couple that with a few ISP's who don't seem to give two damn's about their customer and we heve problems. I can assure anyone reading this, that *I* will do my best if I get your order and there is a problem with it.

    We apprecate our customers, we know that the only way to survive against the odds is to treat them better then the ILEC (or for that matter our competition) would treat them (which, from what I hear wouldn't take much ;).

    I can only say that if we (Covad, Northpoint, Rhythm) go out of business, what incentive will the phone companies have to keep DSL? Hmm, let me see... charge them $100 month for T1 speed when we could drop DSL and just charge over $3000 (or so, I'm not sure of the current prices in the US) for a real T1. I'm sorry, but I seriouly doubt DSL would be available from ILEC's at all if it wasn't for the fact that we started provide it.

    I'm not saying we should be put on a pedistal as the underdog "beating the monopoly against all odds" like Linux vs. Corporate Software, but at least see what may lie in the future if we loose the ability for anyone to compete with the phone company. Broken up or not, they all seem to have the same attitude...
  • I had a similar experience just setting up my DSL service. My Inet service and DSL service were ordered from USWest (USWorst).

    Both the Telco DSL provider and Inet providers had different support lines and guidelines and would blame one another for the problems I was having. I won't go into detail to save time, but it was actually a mix of both of their problems. They constantly bitched and moaned how they're not able to be in "direct contact" with one another so that they won't have a competitive advantage and all.

    Regardless of how accurate their claims were, it still gave both convenient excuses to make claims about who's problem it was that my DSL was not functioning. This just drew out the process and made it just as bad as if I still had an ISP from another company.
  • I had a very simular problem with GTE and was buying directly from the telco(and telco procedures ARG!!). I had a 1 year contract with them and was able to drop it becuase of their self addmitted failure to provide services. With 8 months of service i must have had at least 30 days down time. I live in Dallas where there is lots of competition for my money and they didnt seem to care. The employees at the company were in complete agreement that buying network services from a telco was an all together bad idea.

    I now have a cable modem at home and havent had any down time. No contract and its beutiful. Take my advice stick with an ISP when you want anything over a wire. Telcos dont know how to be anything but a blood sucking inefficient monopoly.

    Not to rant but, I think the sooner Ma Bell dies the better off we will all be. Telcos are the picture of a inefficient buisness model.
  • This is a horrible story.

    Living in the middle of the heartlands and have no high-speed connection.

    I'm clinging on to my current appartement and cable provider, as it is one of the very few in Norway who actually delivers cable modem services.

    At around USD50 a month, I might add (for 512 kbps bi-derectional, 2 Mbps bi-dir costs USD170,-, which isn't to bad, all things concidered).

    Reading your story made my day better, I'm sorry it's on your expense.


    --
    The Speedy Viking

  • I tried to get residential ADSL from Covad via CapuNet over Bell Atlantic lines. Everything seemed set until CapuNet and I received an e-mail that said, "Order cancelled. No copper to door."

    It turns out that Bell Atlantic Residential Telephone doesn't speak with Bell Atlantic High Speed Internet. The latter offers only DSL options for high speed Internet access, while the former has been wiring northern Virginia homes directly with fiber optic!

    When I spoke with a Bell Atlantic technical representative, he agreed that clearly this was a disconnect between the two arms of Bell Atlantic, but that as far as he knew there was nobody in Bell Atlantic interested in resolving the issue.

    So now I'm waiting for Adelphia to wire my neighborhood for cable modem. In "The Dilbert Principle" Scott Adams predicted that the telephone companies would win the high speed Internet access race, because "the cable companies are staffed with guys who couldn't get jobs at the phone companies." Humorous, true, but Bell Atlantic seems to be proving Mr. Adams wrong.

    Here in northern Virginia, at least, Bell Atlantic has handed the high speed Internet business to the cable companies.

  • Well - technically your DSL 'modem' IS a multiplexor, not a 'modem' at all.
  • Heheheh. Have a look at http://www.dslreports.com and one will discover that, when there is trouble, just about EVERYONE gets hurt with DSL. It is irrelevant whether the entire setup is provided by "one" company, or through an ILEC/Link Carrier/ISP arrangement.
  • The DSL provider I have my connection through is extremely impressive, WRT getting service. (Their tech support, on the other hand, makes Microsoft look awe-inspiring.)

    On the other hand, I've had endless problems with the phone company they get their connection from. It looks more like politics than anything, with the phone company hell-bent on preventing anyone using any DSL service other than their own (which they've not even rolled out, yet).

    IMHO, anyone having problems with DSL should send the relevent core-dumps to their local phone company, along with detailed descriptions of the application of fingernails to chalkboards.

  • BA has a history of obstructing ISPs becuase they view the ISP business as rightfully theirs. ISPs have seen obstruction in getting lines, poor quality lines and obstacles to getting problems fixed and even creating problems from scratch.

    If you give in and buy DSL from BA, you reward them for the dastardly tactics they've used in the past.

    It's unfortunate that you live in a BA service area as I do. My DSL installation is scheduled for Friday. Wish me luck.

    Hmmm. I hope BA dosn't read this post before then.
    Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
  • We buy or business ADSL (2.2MB down, 700K up, 5 dedicated IPs) through Bell Canada. We've done so for a year, before this service was available through other ISPs.

    Now Trytel and other local ISPs have this service available for 20% cheaper. However, I am extremely hesitant to switch. Here's why:

    When I call Bell I get the Bell Nexxia network technician directly on the phone. These guys speak router, TCP/IP and network protocols, and they know what they are doing. They have diagnosed and fixed the problems we have had both times remotely, quickly and courteously.

    When I call Trytel (they do our mail and dialup) I get some jerkoff on the phone who starts in with making sure my Netscape settings are correct. When I am talking about network uptime for my business, I don't want to leave it in the hands of these clowns, plain and simple.

    Right now, I'll pay the 20% premium and feel secure that someone competent is on the other end of the phone. Maybe it is different for home use, but for a business I'm sticking with the telco.

  • When I got DSL service I got it through Concentric which resells Covad service. When I signed up for the service they said it would take 45-60 days to process. I wasn't happy with that, but there didn't seem to be any way to get it faster. As it turned out though it was a very cautious estimate. In fact it took about 3 weeks.

    The installation went very smoothly and the guy who came out to my place appeared to actually have a clue about what he was doing. We got the line all set up and tested and I haven't had a problem since.

    What's really nice is that concentric's target market seems to be small home office set ups. They explicitly state that you can run servers on your DSL connection, they just don't support it. With the service I have I've got a 768/384 line with 4 STATIC IP Addresses, and I haven't seen any unexpected downtime in the 4 months that I have had it.

    So, I highly recommend them! And no, I don't receive any money from them, honest! :)

    ---

  • living in manhatten, I initially went with bell atlantic since they offered a good monthly rate and since they "owned" the phone lines. When I called up Concentric, they told me there would be close to a 2 month wait before I got the lines put in due to hassling with Bell Atlantic.

    So I used Bell Atlantic for a month. 1 IP address, and the upstream sucked. So I called up Concentric and said get me on the list. 2 months later I got Concentric DSL. But only after Bell Atlantic people had to come in, between 8am and 5pm on a work day, not show up, and say they'll be there the following week. This actually happened a few times. Or once they had come in, Concentric technicians would come in, see what Bell Atlanic had done, and say that they hadn't finished the job. Basically, half-ass work all around. But the Concentric people were very kind, courteous, and answered tech-support quickly and efficiently.

    I couldn't say that with Bell Atlantic.
  • I can't offer much of a view onhow things work in the States, it was bad enough trying to order 5 phone lines and ISDN service along with a phone system from BellSouth Miami while I was safely tucked up in London, but I can give you a bit of an idea of how it works here

    We have an incumbent monopolistic telephone supplier, British Telecom [bt.com], who have a monopoly on most of the local loop. We also have cable operators and a few business oriented suppliers but outside of the large cities BT gets the lions share of the cake.

    The are offering a service to ISPs for ADSL. It operates over a customer's existing line and the ISP incurs all costs. BT havedeveloped a 2.4Gbps nationwide ATM network over which all ADSL traffic is carried. When a customer is connected they are connected directly into this, they authenticate and a virtual channel is created allowing a direct IP connection to their chosen ISP. This costs a minimum of £40 per month plus VAT (17.5%) for the ISP per customer. The ISP must also purchase a "Central" link into the ATM network which costs upwards of £5000 per year for a 512kbps link (Currently the Central link is limited to 34Mbps but will be offered soon at 155Mbps and multiple central links may be bought)

    This provides a basic 512kbps level of service with a single IP offered over an Alcatel Speed Touch USB modem, which is owned by BT, on a maximum contention ratio of 50:1. For a faster or network capable service you must go to a more expensive service which starts at £68 for 512kbps, a router and 20:1 contention ratio rising to £110 for a 2Mbps variant.

    All these prices are before ISP service is applied, all lines have to be BT, the service is not yet available (Launches next month).

    To make it even worse all contact, ordering, support has to be provided through the ISP. There is no way of checking with BT regarding faults or resolutions of problems.

    I don't know wether this is better than the US way of things or not as I don't have experience of the US DSL situation but I thought some people might like to know whats going on in the other side of the pond. Visit ADSLuk [adsluk.org.uk] if you're interested in any more details.

  • we have two pairs in my apartment: one as a regular POTS (analog) phone line and one as a dual adsl/pots (via a HP/LP splitter) line.

    a day before the power outage (I'm in the silicon valley area), I lost phone service. and dsl as well. I just shrugged it off and figured it would be back in a few hours or so.

    a few hours later, I finally got annoyed enough to call pacbell. now it seems that if you have adsl (the 'A' is important; sdsl doesn't have this problem) and you call 611 service, if you tell them you have dsl - EVEN if your whole pair is down, they forward you to pachell/dsl for repair.

    I sat on hold for a full half hour. then got a message saying 'due to the unusually long (ha!) waiting period, we're forwarding you to a voicemail mailbox. [ok, that's cool I guess].

    doh! the next message was 'sorry, that mailbox is full. please try your call again later'.

    doh!

    it wasn't until mid next-day that my phone AND dsl were restored. meantime, the pachell guys were trying to say that I had a 'short in the line'. man, they can't even tell when their own dslam is down! ;-(

    bottom line: if your primary phone service is important to you, consider 'burning' a 2nd line JUST for sdsl. do NOT tie your voice phone service and adsl together in the same pair. if dsl goes down (at the main CO), it takes your voice circuit down along with it.

    this is totally unacceptable. when I worked at a cable modem company, there was a lot of talk about voice-over-IP and if/when cable modems will provide 'dialtone' service. the prevailing question at that time was "would you trust your cable operator to provide dialtone, and at a high enough uptime so that 911 was trustable.

    all I can say is: my cable still worked but my phone and dsl were down...

    and btw, that 2nd pots-only line I have was ALWAYS working; it was only the dual adsl/pots line that was down. further reinforcing the idea that my lines were physically ok (no shorts) but that the CO someone screwed me over on my adsl twisted pair.

    --

  • Geez, I hope you're joking. Aren't you? The same company that routinely uses 10-15% "cost of inflation" rate increases wants you to buy into their bizarrely firewalled and massively shared connection, and you honestly believe that's better than a straight pipe to the backbone over a data network that's been roughly the most reliable infrastructure in the history of mankind?

    I'll stick with DSL, thanks. At least, once I move a little closer to the CO.

  • Hi!

    Your post ends with the magic words:

    "With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies."

    As it happens, Bell Atlantic is in hot water on this very subject. The State of New York just fined BA $10 million for anticompetitive practices with regard to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission has gone so far as to require BA to divest their retail phone operations (so the "wholesale distribution" side treats all carriers equally). The state's Consumer Advocate is presently on a campaign about businesses that have been harmed when they switched to a CLEC, and Bell dropped all mention of them from directory assistance.

    In other words, the regulators are watching. If BA is jerking around CLEC DSL customers while providing a different level of service to its own customers, that's anticompetitive.

    Call your state legislator--ask him or her to ask the Public Utility Commission for information on resolving complaints about poor DSL service. You may have to explain DSL to the kid who answers the phone (he's a political science major/groupie) but legislators love constituent service opportunities like this. They will ask for pertinent information (so the letter can say, "My good friend Elmer Stutzenfreud (Circuit ID #17X933099J32, Covad ID# 234234234, BA Repair order #NY0339993A3) has mentioned to me the severe impact of a DSL outage on his business....")

    Regulated monopolies have zero incentive to listen to consumers. But they live and die by the whim of the legislature--and the legislators know it. Call your state rep or state senator, and ask for help.

    P.S.: There is a quid to the pro quo: when your legislator comes up for reelection he will ask for your vote. If he has done an effective job representing your interests, you probably should vote for him.
  • PacBell does all it's IDSL through Northpoint, but of course the physical lines are PacBell.

    So you call PacBell Internet (who for the first few calls denies you are a customer since IDSL isn't in their DSL customer database, and sends you off to data services, or phone line repair), they take a generic problem report which goes into the cue (mine sat there for 2 weeks before being forwarded to Northpoint). They asks lots of questions about operating system you are running, and other software questions (the modem sync light goes red, doesn't need to be connected to a computer to show the error, but they still make you answer all kinds of pointless questions).

    Northpoint then makes a request for PacBell to check the lines. Eventually Pacbell shows up, diddles a bit, says it seems ok, and leaves. No contact number, no status, nothing.

    So when it immediately fails again, you have no way to contact Northpoint or PacBell repair. You must start over with PacBell internet again.

    Next time, Northpoint comes out, checks the inside wiring and modem (they just use a laptop and hookup a new IDSL modem to the outside wires). They call PacBell wiring again, who fiddles some more, again says it's fixed, again it's dead in a few hours. So we start the dance again....

    You get the idea... I've been down for nearly 7 weeks.

    In the meanwhile, my Cable modem has never been down for more than 5 minutes, and is insanely fast (often double the speed of a real T1).

  • Unfortunately, your situation is a rare and brilliant opportunity for all kinds of people to make money and not work. I have the same problem. I live in a pseudo-third-world country. To get to the Internet I have to rent a frame relay circuit from the (local) local phone company, pay a local ISP, and the (international) local phone company, which hooks into another ISP in the States -- when anything goes wrong the first thing all of these folks do is point the finger at each other (oh and us of course), and do nothing until we determine where the problem is on there behalf. And no matter what, they still get paid because there is no choice! If you have a choice at all, use it to influence these vendors. Vote with your dollars. Good luck.
  • I've done a fair amount of work for a regional ISP which also works with Bell Atlantic (although the ISP concentrates on frame relay services, rather than DSL). My experiences with BA have varied pretty wildly in quality. I'll summarize a couple for you here, in descending order of quality.
    • A day following a lightning storm, one of our clients goes down. I phone the regional SNCC (their service center) to open a ticket. Within about 45 minutes, they call me back to let me know that the circuit ran cleanly in diagnostic all the way to the CSU/DSU, which usually indicates broken hardware on the customer end. We go out to replace it, and voila.
    • One of our client sites goes down for no apparently good reason. After having the client reboot the router (and power-cycle the CSU/DSU), we open a ticket with Bell. Half an hour later, the problem is magically fixed. Ten minutes after that, Bell calls to let us know that they ran a diagnostic on the line, but nothing was wrong with it.
    • Driving into work, we see a couple of Bell guys working on an access point. We hold our collective breath. Shortly thereafter, our monitor detects one of our largest clients (500-1000 employees, and politically signifigant) has gone down. After a good deal of finger pointing, BA finally admits that their work on the access point had precipitated the outage, but that it was really our fault, since the setup there should never have worked in the first place, so what are you gonna do about it? Our response: if it shouldn't have worked in the first place, why did you set it up for us, and why did it work until today? And by the way, fix it, or our client is liable to sue you.
    In short, the thing to remember when dealing with Bell Atlantic is that the weather may be bad, ISPs are usually clueless, and customer premise equipment is always faulty, but in the eyes of Bell Atlantic, Bell Atlantic is never wrong. As long as you remember this, you and Bell can get along fine.

  • Free the Copper! (Score:3)

    by tmu ( 107089 ) <todd-slashdot@re n e s y s .com> on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @04:23AM (#1038844) Homepage
    This is a sad, sad state of affairs (but the experiences that the author describes are far from uncommon). The reality is that as long as a single organization gets to mediate access to the physical copper plant *and* to make money off of advanced services provided on that plant.

    We all paid for the copper decades ago. In fact, we paid for it again, because of some creative acconting that the Baby Bells (RBOCs) used in the late 90s (96-97) becuase they convinced regulators and auditors that they were planning on replacing the entire copper plant with fiber and so they should be able to write the whole thing off since it was worthless. Copper. Worthless. You know how DSL gets into your house? Copper. Hmmmmmm.

    I work at an ISP that provides DSL from three different carriers, two of them CLECS (competitive local exchange carriers) and one an RBOC (regional bell operating company - US West). The three-party problems that the author described have been made *much* worse by Covad's unwillingness to deal directly with smaller ISPs (they now want a minimum 20,000 - 25,000 line commitment) so most of the people providing Covad DSL don't have a relationship with Covad; they are reselling DSL services from some other regional ISP (increasing the problems to 4 parties!).

    One thing we keep telling commercial customers who are compelled by the low prices of DSL: When your T1 line goes down we have a $200-400 / month stick to beat up the phone company with. Mean time to respond for us (we have hundreds of circuits) is about 1 hour, mean time to repair is about 2 hours. When your DSL line goes down we have a $19 / month stick to beat up the phone company with and we can't even talk to them. We have to call the DSL carrier who has to beat them up with the $19 twig. It takes a week. Sometimes longer.

    This is the key problem with DSL: enterprise speeds with romper room repair times. In the the current setup there is no obvious way to fix it.

  • France Telecom has this offering, "Netissimo", which is real crap. They had to open it up to other ISP thanks to the telecom utilities agency (ART [art-telecom.fr]). Initially, that is, during the beta test phase (which lasted something like 3 years!), when they were the only ISP (Wanadoo), they were using DHCP, which gave great performance and great pings (resp. close to 500kbps and less than 40 ms regularly).

    Now, to accomodate with opening up their infrastructure, they have come up with a complex system involving PPTP instead of DHCP, and multiplexing ISP connectivity through a complex and already saturated ATM backbone.

    On top of that, they have come up with a stupid limitation for ISPs whereby they are only allowing them to buy a limited bandwidth per customer -- this limit was initially as low as 6kBITs/s! Such a low limit comes from their broken market analysis. They had done their beta test by giving away connections to random people. However, the distribution of users amongst those who actually want to spend the money is actually quite different -- most casual surfers that were included in the initial test period did'nt want to pay, whereas telecommuters and hardcore gamers, who hit hard on the bandwidth esp. during peak period, being now a fair share of their clientele!

    So they've raised the limit, but still to an uselessly low level.

    Initially, for your amazement, I got a whopping 30kBITs/s max transfer rate and 1000ms minimum ping! Yeah, they have no clue how to configure their convoluted network. Apparently, they don't even know what causes such a high lag. And no, it's nothing to do with the actual ADSL technology: theoretically, you can get bad lag from ADSL at higher rates (4+ Mbps) if your line has too much noise (like when you're far away from the central). However, I'm a few hundred meters away from it, the line quality has been found good, etc ... and amongst users just about everybody experiences bad lags regularly, if not constantly.

    Now we've started a user group [adsl-france.org] to try to lobby France Telecom -- but it's hard to get a big corporation to actually give out any information (as opposed to smaller ISPs giving realtime info on their network for instance).

    I pay something like $65 (450FF) for 512/128 kbps. Things have improved lately and I get about 400kbps and 100ms pings out of it.



  • Has anyone else had problems like this?

    At my place of work, where are getting a dedicated line from MCI^H^H^H this company, which shalt remain nameless. Anyways, the higher ups pay one huge bag of money to this company for the "full-dedicated solution". The line goes down once in awhile *cough*every fucking month*cough* and I have to call this companies support engineers to get "full-dedicated tech support", which there tech support team is really good by the way, probably because they have ALOT of practice at it.

    Anyways, I hear this ALOT
    "Ok this is simple, just plug it in and it should work"

    "So you going to plug it in"

    "Hell no, are you crazy, we have to wait for the local telco techs to get here, I am not allowed to touch this line"

    This one time I remember the line being down for 12+ hours, it took me my entire work day just to find and convince a support engineer that this was HIS line and HE should of been working on it.

    "Have you tried calling the local telco? you should try them first"

    "Uh, we got the complete package from you guys, we pay you guys and we never even talked to the local telco, your sales person said that you guys handled the local telco"

    "Oh, now that is your problem there son, you listened to the sale person. You just got the block them out."

  • If I'd waited for US Worst (Life's bitter here!) to get DSL in my area, I'd STILL be waiting. The dudes over at Covad have claimed that the telcos have no incentive to run cheap DSL which would impact their quite profitable T1 business. I believe them.

    I checked Covad out and they said they could run me a line. I made contact with one of their ISP partners, Speakeasy, who I also highly reccomend -- they're Linux clueful and they don't seem to be overcommiting their service -- I can usually get the full speed of my line when downloading files except for a couple of sites which are slow from anywhere I've tried them.

    For $200 a month I'm getting 768K both ways, and some static IP addresses. That covers the ISP and the DSL line, which is included in the ISP bill. Covad was incredibly quick to get a guy out to my house to run the line in -- I was expecting to have to wait a couple of months and they got it all turned around and on within a couple of weeks.

    There is one thing you do have to watch out for, and that's the initial installation charge. Make sure you get a quote for that along with the rest of the service or you'll get a nasty surprise on the first bill. I'm used to leased prices though, so I didn't find it unreasonable.

  • Check this site out. They have reviews of all sorts of ISPs and DSL connects. Covad is not always at fault. I have access through CapuNet in the D.C. area and they have been great! They give me 4 static IPs, reverse DNS, and let me run any stuff I want on my end. They have great tech support and were very prompt about the install. In fact, they were one day EARLY. They piggyback on Covad equipment. Bell Atlantic couldn't even get me service when I called but CapuNet came through.

    Also on the dslreports site, they really bash on Flashcom. Apparantly one of the WORST ISPs for DSL service.

    BTW, I do not work for any of these companies in any way, shape, or previous incarnation.
  • I use Bell Atlantic at home. I am at their mercy at work via third-party providers.

    No matter who you go with in BA's service area, you're stuck with their incompetence when initially getting hooked up. There's not a thing you or anyone else can do about it. Nonetheless, you should by all means go with a different service provider. Getting connected is an absolute nightmare even if BA is your end-to-end provider because they're unserstaffed and undertrained at all ends of the business. BA's different groups don't coordinate with each other or even communicate regularly with each other. In practical terms, it's as though you're dealing with 3 different companies when getting connected. Don't make the mistake of thinking that going with BA simplifies things.

    At least with a company like Flashcom, you have a shot at decent, responsive customer support after the initial nightmare is over. And you have a shot at getting something close to the advertised bandwidth, since you're not hanging entirely off of BA's overcrowded routers and hubs.

    I'm sure you've seen this URL a few times already, but it can't be recommended enough. http://www.dslreports.com [dslreports.com]
  • Reading the previous post reminded me of a little oddity with concentric DSL. After I signed up at 768/384 they started offering 1.5/384. I called them to see if I could get a free upgrade but as it turns out the 768 may be a better deal. With the 1.5 you get a higher possible rate, but your committed information rate is lower than on the 768 line. Kinda wierd way of doing things, but I guess they figure they can sell people on the ridiculously high 1.5Mbs and if they don't deliver it all the time you can't complain because your CIR isn't nearly as high.

    ---

  • I would highly discourage the use of the "service" Covad provides. My experiences are similar to those that have already been posted. I was promised a 608/128 aDSL connection through Covad with their Speedstream external modem. I live about 10,000 feet away from the main switches so they told me that I'd probably get T1 speeds. I get about 7.3 KBps or about 60 Kbp/s. Two modems shotgunned together could beat this. I later found out that where the contract says, "Dedicated 608/128 kbp/s line" actually means, "Up to 608/128 through best effort". I created a huge stink, and after threating a lawsuit, I found out the connections are shared and have been oversold. It took about 3 months of calling their office everyday, and they have finally agreed to give me a PARTIAL refund. Stay away from Covad!
  • I have Mindspring as an my service provider, Covad as the line maintainer, and Ameritech as my local phone company in Chicago. My line worked great for about three months, and then one day it just stopped. There was no power surge, thunderstorm, or anything else. I was connected in linux, rebooted to windows, and could no longer connect to the outside world.

    My setup uses a FlowPoint 2100 ADSL router and my PC connects to it via PPPoE which is a pain in the ass. When I called up Mindspring's technical support, I had to talk to the "Reboot the machine" and "Uninstall/reinstall the software" people for a couple days before they directed me to someone with a clue. Once that happened, the process was very slow because Mindspring had to contact Covad who had to arrange an appointment with me. When the Covad guy couldn't figure it out, I had to call up the Mindspring guy again. The Mindspring guy then had to contact Covad to run some line tests and then eventually after another week sent Covad back out to my apartment. This time, the Covad guy was able to fix the problem, but it had already been three weeks since I first went offline.

    Now that I was connected, I ran a couple of port scans on my machine from an outside computer, and knocked my router offline. My line came back up for about a day, but then dropped off again and as of today, I have been offline for another week and a half. This evening, I am getting a cable modem.

    Surprisingly, the cable company has a monopoly on their lines, but they charge less per month than the mess known as the DSL provider. So far, they have also provided better customer service.

    Long live the monopoly!

  • My company has business DSL with Concentric.

    We had a 12 hour (!) outage in Los Angeles.

    Unfortunately, I really can't blame Concentric for it, since they go through Covad and it appears to have been Covad's fault. Of course this is no real consolation since virtually everyone goes with Covad.

    Anyone have experience with Northpoint?

    D

    ----
  • I called them, I signed up with them, and two days later I got an emailed offer for free equipment and no setup fee.

    Of course by then I'd already agreed to pay for my equipment and the setup fee, so I feel a bit used. Moral is that if you're not in a total hurry where days matter, wait a couple of days between expressing interest and actually placing your order to get a better deal.

    They do seem to offer pretty good customer service, though, although I'm underwhelmed by the speed of my iDSL connection (see my other comments).

    D

    ----
  • The service you're referring to is iDSL. The $90 a month is the full cost for the service.

    What they do is route the DSL through ISDN, therefore extending the reach from their central office. This means they use a more expensive ISDN line, thus the added cost. This also means it's slower than most regular DSL connections.

    It took Covad three different service calls, three different service people and three months to get my service operational, because of (i) the lousy wiring in my apartment complex, (ii) a mysterious conflict between them and Pacific Bell, and (iii) a significant difference in the competence and customer-friendly attitude of their service reps. I have been informed that such a difficult install is not typical.

    In the month or so I've had the service, it's been down once, for about an hour, for Covad-related problems.

    When it's worked, it's given me decent but not exceptional speed. I'd say it's worth the $90 a month - I wouldn't go back to a modem, surely. But at the same time, if you have any other alternatives, such as moving to an area where DSL works, or getting your own T1, you might want to take them. I understand T1 rates in the Bay Area are the world's lowest, so you might want to consider that option.

    In one of those charming ironies that makes life worthwhile, only about a month after DSL service was turned on, I am moving to a much-improved residence. I dreaded calling them and discovering the costs, but apparently it's saving me money, not costing me. They will unwind the whole deal with the previous install, charging me nothing; then I have to pay for the eqiupment and install on the new deal. This seemed fair to me. So kudos to Speakeasy, my provider. Now let's see if they deliver on that promise. They certainly dropped a lot of money on the install; I was surprised to see how cooperative they appeared on the phone.

    D

    ----
  • In Canada (or perhaps just where I live in BC) things get kinda ugly with DSL. Here goes.....

    1. Installation via the local phone company costs a direct $50 Canadian. Installation via an ISP costs $150, $50 of which goes to the local phone carrier, $65 of which goes to the people kind enough to set this up, and $35 goes to the ISP. Supreme rip off right here on the ISP end due to CRTC regulations.

    2. Local phone carriers offer a cap on how much bandwidth I may use in total per month (though don't appear to actually cap you, they only state this in their policy). ISP's however allow users only 2GB of bandwidth per month, charge $20 per GB after this ($7 of which goes to the phone company, $13 of which goes to the ISP). Another reason to go directly through the phone company.

    3. Here's an plus for the ISP... Local phone companies do not offer Reverse DNS or Static IP's. ISP's in my area will generally do this for me without hassle or question, and will often even handle Forward DNS no problem. It may often be cheaper to recieve more IP Addresses as well at an ISP level.

    4. If my service goes down at an ISP level, the ISP will have to open a ticket with the phone company, often leaving the customer high and dry, thinking the problem is at the ISP level. This has left many customers in my area very dissatisfied with ADSL ISP's around here, when in fact it is just bad service on the phone carrier level.

    5. It appears the DSLAM's in my area do not support all brands of ADSL routers... This appears to have been a way to get only certain brands of ASDL routers (e.g. USR HomeConnect) monopolized in my area, while we cannot use Cisco 67x routers due to their chipset. I personally like controlling SNMP and syslogd on my router without having to break into a router that has been leased to me by the ISP or phone company.

    6. Local ISP's get first dibs on all available circuits in your area. ISP's get whatever remains on a 3 month cycle, all due to CRTC regulations. This means that the phone company never tells us there are ports available immediately, and instead puts us on a 'waiting list'. I have heard of people complaining about this to get activated immediately.

    My overall impression? Go with the phone company for ADSL access, though small businesses and power users will like ISP's simply for Reverse DNS and Static IP's (which is the only thing making me scratch my head).

    eraseme
  • Qwest vs. Covad vs Pac Bell

    I ordered DSL on January 12. I finally got it working May 12. Everything that could have gone wrong, did. It's was quite amazing, and after the fourth month I became determined that hell was not going to freeze over before I got my damn link.

    The original install date was 5 weeks after my order was placed. fine. I am in So Cal, and everyone and their dog spot wants DSL. Pac Bell shows up 2 days early to verify the line. The D-mark (it you want DSL, you MUST know where your D-mark is) is in my garage so I need to be home for any work to be done on the line. Thankfully I was home when Pac Bell showed up early. They verified the line, all was good, and the next day I got a e-mail from Covad saying Pac Bell would be there the next day. Whatever.

    Covad shows up on the appropriate day to verify the inside wiring, and hook up the modem. I turned OFF my Linux box, so they wouldn't freak out and say they don't support that. Advice to others - take no chances with the install people. Covad hooks up the modem and installs some cables, and viola, no link. damn.

    He goes off to the Central Office and I never hear from him again. Next day I call Qwest (ISP) to find out what the deal is. The e-mail Covad my question and cc: me. Now I have my Qwest tracking number and Covad tracking number. These are very very important numbers, I used them often.

    Every day for the next month I call Covad with my tracking number to find out any progress. I managed to escalate my trouble ticket to "Red" status. Only ISP's can do this, but since I had all my tracking numbers and was always very nice to people on the phone, they hooked me up. I also got the direct line for the So Cal dispatch for Covad. I started to call them directly to schedule appts. Covad comes out three more times and Pac Bell comes out twice more, and they blame each other for the lack on link. One of the Covad installers checks the wrong box on his form, and cancels my order. dammit, beavis. I found this out the next time I call Covad, and they tell me my order was cancelled and only an ISP can re-instated it.

    So I fire off an e-mail to everyone from Pac Bell, Covad and Qwest who every sent me anything - about 15 names total. Looks like one of them was a supervisor, because I got an appointment scheduled quickly (but no order new order # for Covad)

    Time for a vendor meet.

    Scheduling conflicts all around, and another month passes by. Finally, the day of the vendor meet in is early May. Klaus from Covad shows up early to inspect inside wiring and the modem. Turned out the modem has been fried due to Pac Bells testing. Klaus tells me he is in charge of Covad's LA installs and only get involved on the 3rd attempt, and 75% of the installs go without a hitch. The other 25% are pure hell. He also blames the breakup for AT&T for all their current problems, and mutters something about poor documentation, equipment installed improperly, or not at all. Klaus hates pre breakup AT&T. Klaus also configured my modem improperly.

    Pac Bell changes the appt. to later in the day and Klaus has to leave, but he sends one of his proteges out to make sure it all works. He and the Pac Bell guy spend all day here and at the central office upgrading equipment. Two days later I have link. wow.

    One last problem, the info I originally got from Qwest with my ISP addresses, subnet, etc was wrong, so two more days on the phone to Qwest I finally get the correct info, reconfigure my modem and now it all works.
    - daniel

  • Look at http://www.dslreports.com for the definition. :)

  • I had this problem a while back with USWest. Unfortunately, even though I dealt with only them, they had three separate areas within the company that did not work together at all and found the same problems.

    I wrote this up on my website at http://www.half-truth.com/uswest [half-truth.com] if you'd care to read about it in detail.

    // dijit
    dijit-at-half-truth.com

  • Cable is certainly faster than dialup (usually), I'll happily grant.

    The "usually" comes from the fact that, at least where I live, there tend to be concentrated packets of cable users in the places that xDSL won't reach. The heavy load, then, significantly hits cable's performance.

    I live more than 18000 feet from my CO, too, so I went with 128K ISDN (and lowered the perceived cost by selectively using one of the B channels for voice and disconnecting my old POTS line). The peak speed may be lower, but I'm guaranteed 128Kbps of bandwidth.

    I've been considering going dual-homed approach: ISDN for the stability and static IPs, and cable for the raw speed. Updates to follow as appropriate.

  • When I first had PacBell DSL installed on my phone line, I experienced the same sort of thing you experienced, but internally within PacBell. Turns out their Internet division is separate from their phone division, and the DSL provisioning group is a subgroup within their phone service group. I got the impression they didn't let their DSL provisioning group within 100 feet of their Internet group at any time, even if there was pizza involved.

    To make a long story short, I experienced several delays, and even misplaced work orders, in part because of the segregation between divisions. And while FlashDSL and Bell Atlantic may be worse at communicating with eachother than PacBell's internal divisions were, I suspect switching to the phone company's own DSL provider may not fix this communications issue much.

    Note that I'm not faulting PacBell or large bureaucracies; I suspect the separation between divisions is largely a legal construct to prevent PacBell from getting into legal hot water with the various third party DSL Internet providers...

  • That's not how DSL typically works. Usually an end user has a virtual circuit of the specified bandwidth, over ATM, past the CO and to the main egress routers. In other words, the connection really is dedicated. It's only one layer-3 hope from customer to Internet.

  • There are two factors that determine whether you can get DSL, and what speeds/flavors are available:
    • Whether your CO has a DSLAM (and what kind.)
    • How far you are from your telco central office (CO)

    The DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexer) is the box in the CO that handles your line and forwards your packets to a DSL carrier's ATM switch or router. It may be owned by the Telco (aka ILEC, Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier), or by a CLEC (Competitive LEC) like Covad, Northpoint, Rhythms, or Jato. In the middle of Silicon Valley, there are probably multiple carriers' DSLAMs; in Buffalo Wyoming there probably aren't any. The DSL carrier has some kind of regional concentration network, usually ATM, and connects a feed to whatever ISPs want to buy one. Some carriers, like Covad, have national ATM networks, so an ISP can connect to any Covad DSLAM in the US, probably for a higher price and somewhat higher latency than a local connection. The ISP is responsible for providing the router, IP address space, and most customer support; the ISP is a customer of the DSL carrier, who is a customer of the telco that owns the wire to your house.


    Distance to the CO determines what DSL protocols and speeds can be used. For SDSL (the symmetric stuff), you can get about 12000 feet at 768kbps, and 18000 feet at 384kbps. If you want to go a long distance, IDSL uses ISDN electrical formats on the wire, but connects to a DSLAM for full-time packet service instead of connecting to a phone switch for ISDN telephone calls, and it gets smoething like 24000-30000 feet at 144kbps. These distances are equivalent wire lengths - that's how long the wire really is, adjusted for wire quality, and you can't get decent performance if you exceed the lengths. The telco can't always tell how far away you are - my house is supposed to be 11000 feet from the CO, but once when I had phone trouble, they did some tests that suggested it might be 16000, and later when I got DSL service, we gave up on getting 768kbps to work and used 384kbps.

    Many of the telcos, such as Pac Bell, also provide DSLAMs and IP service. It's theoretically more likely to be successful than separate carriers, though there are mixed opinions about how well it works in practice (the negative opinions aer usually louder.) Also, ADSL makes it possible to use one pair of copper to carry both a voice circuit and an ADSL circuit, using splitters at the house. This is a big win for provisioning speed, because you can use the customer's existing phone wire pair, rather than installing a new one. It's mostly supported for Telco-provided DSL, though the telcos are supposed to let the CLECs also offer it in most territories, and it'll gradually become available in practice.

    Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, which sells DSL service for businesses and consumers. Last year, when we were starting to offer DSL service, I volunteered to be a guinea pig beta user. Pac Bell owns the wires, Covad did the DSLAMs, and AT&T did the ISP portion. It worked quite nicely - installation took a bit longer than it should because I'm in a condo (inside wiring was fun) and because I was the first DSL customer on the ATM switch supporting my DSLAM (extra hour getting it configured correctly) and because my telephone line was either longer or noisier than PacBell told Covad it would be. The Flowpoint router worked well, and has a built-in hub. At the time we started our service, we only supported the business-priced Covad service and not the consumer-priced service, so when the beta period was over and they figured out how to bill me (:-), I disconnected it -- 384kbps is nice, but $180 was a bit much for home use. We've now got several reasonably-priced consumer offers (either 384 SDSL or 608/128 ADSL for $59), but cable modem service is supposed to finally be available in my town now (after 1.5 years of promising it Real Soon), and it gives me a better inside wiring setup.

  • A note on the reality of 3rd party DSL (Score:3)

    by Wolfstar ( 131012 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2000 @10:55AM (#1038970)
    Okay, I've been reading through these posts, and I've been seeing a good number of comments and gripes about Covad or Northpoint or whatever. Some are insightful, some are clueless. I work for a major ISP with over a thousand DSL lines through Covad, and the Powers That Be set up a department just to handle troubleshooting of DSL, Frame Relay, T1s, and ISDN. We deal with Covad every day, and there's a few realities that are getting overlooked.

    Lily Tomlin was correct. They're the phone company, they don't have to care. Here's why. Covad/Northpoint/Whomever pays the ILEC - be it Bell Atlantic, US West, PacBell, whatever - a grand total of around $7 a month for each copper pair used for DSL. This doesn't precisely make the telco wanna jump when your circuit goes down.

    From the DSL Provider side, an interesting statistic from Covad that we finally managed to get out of them - AFTER we threatened to leave for another Provider - is that overall, 85% of the calls that they recieve from their ISP partners are a No Trouble Found call. This means that some total twit on the ISP's front line gets a call saying that a DSL line doesn't work, doesn't bother to have the router or DSL modem powercycled, and doesn't bother to check if all the cables are seated properly before they turn around and call the DSL provider to have them troubleshoot. So when you have a legitimate line issue, like an open in your circuit, it's got to get through the 85% noise before it's considered an actual signal problem. There are a few ISPs that don't do that. We actually have a 5% No Trouble Found ratio with Covad. I don't know who the worst offenders are on this, but I DO know that Concentric is one of them.

    RBOCs are LAZY. Good example? We deal with mostly East Coast customers. Bell Atlantic's repair department is open Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm. Which means that if your DSL line goes down late Friday afternoon, and it's because of a break in the circuit halfway between you and the CO, you don't have a prayer of getting it fixed until probably Tuesday. And Bell Atlantic's techs are notorious for exerting themselves to find out why they aren't the problem.

    Outages. DSL is highly outage-prone because in a lot of ways it still is in a Beta phase. The 12-hour outage that someone mentioned in Los Angeles I happen to know involved a massive conference call with Covad's switch and telco vendors, their entire Network Operations department, and about half of the Senior VPs in the company in an effort to get this fixed. Our company had been through something similar prior to that, and I know for a fact that they were working their butts off to get it back up and running. They then went through their network and made VERY sure that it wouldn't happen again. But new hardware fails. you take it as it goes.

    ISPs tend to be lazy on the front lines, so you may have to push hard to get results. Remember that these front line techs could be handling everything from dialup to T1, so they're busy as hell with people wanting to get their pr0n. If you've got a commercial circuit, make sure your ISP has a commercial support department.

    DSL IS NOT AN INTELLIGENT CHOICE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SERVICES!!!!! I cannot count the number of people who go with a DSL line to save a lot of money when they set up their e-commerce webserver and then scream about losing hundreds and thousands of dollars an hour because their DSL line is down. If you absolutely, positively MUST be connected 24/7 and need a high speed connection, get a T1. Oh. And don't use DSL to back up DSL. If one goes down, so will the other 99% of the time. It's just a waste of money.

    I hope that someone gets something out of this, and actually manages to avoid a fatal mistake. As a further note, when you've got a solid DSL line, it's worth it's weight in gold. I've got a 1.5/384 Rate Adaptive line - what people were talking about when they mentioned the Commited Information Rate - through Speakeasy.net, and I've had only one problem with it, caused by a regional outage with Covad. Enjoy!

  • I've been working with a number of DSL providers. I can tell you from first hand exerience that Flashcom bites. They are already a month late on installing our line. The line is sorta in and the modem in our premise, but the basic problem is that nobody on their end can figure out how to get it to work.
  • I really think in practice the third-party DSL stuff is a really bad idea. In theory it simplifies the DSL process, you call one company to order your DSL and they find out about service in your area. Too bad it doesn't work that way. Here PacBell is offering their own DSL service but then Earthlink (my ISP) is also offering it through a partnership with PacBell. I figured I would go with Earthlink's service even though it was 10$ more because I wouldn't have to switch email addresses and all of those hassles. According to Earthlink my house is out of range of DSL. I called up PacBell to find out when it would be available here (of course Earthlink had no idea) and they told me it was available and asked if I wanted to sign up with them. This is happening to most of the people here. Does anyone find that disturbing? We're a bunch of geeks and technophiles, what about Ma and Pa Average who just want a speedier connection because they just found out about MP3s or are tired of waiting for paged to load on their 28.8 modem? Cable here is the same way, Charter provides the copper but Earthlink hooks Charter's office to the rest of the internet. It's a real hassle trying to get support for that kind of service. I needed Mac software because my cable line needs to use a dialup connection for upstream traffic and Macs don't like doing that with their default TCP drivers. Neither Charter nor Earthlink would provide the free software to do that, they wanted me to pay for SurfDoubler out of my own pocket. If you even mention Linux support they laugh at you or ask you why you don't use Windows. I used to think service companies existed to provide service for paying customers. I no longer have such a naieve view, service companies exist to take your money and make you waste time on the telephone.
  • but the cable company doesn't allow servers

    Road Runner Austin's policy has somewhat changed. They don't allow anonymous servers, which means you can't run a web server or anonymous ftp server. You can run any server you want, as long as you need a password to access it. So you can run a telnet daemon, or an ftp server with no anonymous login, or even a web server if you require a login.

    Also, a lot of people DO run public servers, but they configure their firewall to block the port scanning from RR. There are a couple of IP addresses that RR uses to scan systems, so all you need to do is block those addresses. Technically, you're violating the agreement, but as long as the load is light, no one will notice.

  • I've had BA DSL for about six months now in NYC, and it work, well, OK is about the best I can say. It does go down periodically, but for me at least that's only been about a day or two a month of lost service. Not great, but not horrendous.

    The best advice I can give though is simple: when it goes down, DO NOT ask tech support to fix it unless you are absolutely sure it's not a problem in your entire area (and don't take the tech's word for this, they're often wrong). The support staff is much more likely to break things than fix them. Just sit tight, and wait for the real techs to fix the problem.

    If you demand action from the phone support, they'll do something idiotic like delete your profile. Ideally, you're much better off if the phone support people don't even know you exist. If they touch it, they'll break it.
  • I totally agree that these new service oriented companies are disasters. However, any government regulation is going to have to well thought out and carefully crafted, and the same people that passed the DMCA are unlikely to figure out how to do it. I would suggest that you will have better reform results by focusing on tape recording (with notice) phone calls with salesman and customer support, and then making well documented compliants when they don't follow through. If you feel you are ignored, you should forward all of your documentation to your state's attorney general and consider direct legal action such as small claims court. Your local TV station might broadcast a story on a well documented case of abuse.

    The panacea of "we'll get a law" rarely pays off, especially when the problem is as ill-defined as simply bad business practices by a certain ill-defined class of companies.

    I think the real problem is that we put up with it, especially here in America. How many people actually sit down and carefully read their long distence phone bill ? A large portion of those $1.54 "connection fees" and "access fees" are simply illegal; if you refuse to pay them and write enough letters, they eventually disappear from your bill. I suspect it will take something like a major depression to make Americans start complaining and fighting these types of abuses.

    My experience with phone company's incompetance or fraud (couldn't figure out which) lead me to rely on pre-paid celluar deals for communication -- I always pay in cash, and make sure they never get my name or credit card number. It's more expensive than the other deals, but I suspect all the minor little surprises in roaming charges, exceeding your plan minutes, and the like, make up for it. The fact that they can't send a bill to a pre-paid account means they have to actually charge an honest price at which they make a profit, instead of advertising something too cheaply and shafting everyone in the fine print.
  • Hello /. First, an admission. I work for Covad. Now, a disclaimer... nothing I say here should in any ways be considered the opinion of Covad, or is in any ways representative of Covad. I've been on Slashdot for longer than I've been at Covad... I wanted to let you know what we do at Covad and why you should care. Basically, DSL would not be possible without the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Before 1996, the Baby Bells (ILECs) had no reason to offer DSL, and were quite happy offering extremely expensive ISDN service. They're still trying to protect their ISDN services to business, infact, which probably explains why all the ILECs are out to sell consumer-oriented DSL but really don't push business-oriented DSL much. Covad was the first company that attempted to provide DSL to the public, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Everything having to do with DSL depends upon the ILECs complying with the Telecommunications Act. Sometimes the Baby Bells cooperate... and sometimes they drag their feet. Thankfully, we have a great bunch of lawyers. I have never seen a company where the lawyers are so beloved as here at Covad, since they routinely do battle with the phone companies and come back victorious every time. We may be small, but we routinely prod the ILECs into action. Frankly, DSL businesses wouldn't be able to exist without the legal battles that Covad has fought to get the Baby Bells to comply with the Telecommunications Act. When Covad gets consessions out of the ILECs, everyone wins. One important legal battle that Covad won for consumers is line sharing. Line sharing allows companies like Covad to provide DSL service over your existing phone line. The end effect for consumers is that they can obtain DSL much more rapidly and at a greatly reduced price. Line sharing also opens up the possibility for customers to install their own DSL in the future. DSL also promises cool new technologies, such as Voice over DSL (VoDSL). Would you like to get phone service from your ISP? It may not be as far off as you would think, and that means competition... which means that we all save money. I have read many of the posts here and have let the appropriate people in the company here know about this thread. Obviously, some of the issues people have mentioned are phone company(ILEC) issues, some are ISP issues, and, yes, some are problems with Covad. Unlike some bloated phone company, we can and will solve any issues we are made aware of. Trust me, your chances of getting ILEC problems fixed is actually greater when you go through Covad than when you deal with the ILEC yourself. That's why we can and do routinely provide service for people who the ILECs claim can never get DSL. Before you consider buying DSL from your phone company, go to a site like dslreports.com and read the ILEC horror stories first. Scary... What we do at Covad is not easy... we routinely have to get service from the phone companies, which are entrenched and so full of redtape and roadblocks that it is amazing that we can do what we do. One of the hardest things that we do is figure out ways of working with many different ILECs (and ISPs) with many different processes, cutting out the redtape and getting the job done. I can tell you that the processes that we have in place are infinitely better than they were just a few months back. We are gung-ho when it comes to business automation and improving the customer experience. In short, give Covad a break. We can solve your problems if you let us know about them. You won't find another company in the telecommunications industry that is a bigger advocate for competition (which means lower prices) and giving people a choice. I believe that the legacy of what Covad is doing is more important than whether we succeed or fail; when the dust settles, the era of local phone monopolies will be at an end. Covad is on on the right side of history and is changing an entire industry. If I didn't believe that (and didn't believe that Covad will be VERY major player in a huge market) I wouldn't work here.
  • In the pits baby, I work for a Nascar broadcasting service. We run the audio and video uplinks, mixing etc. Even though I get to go to a lot of races the coolness of going never wears off. I'll wave to you next sunday, I'll be the one in the tacky Nascar t-shirt, you'll be able to pick me out. . . err, no, nevermind.

    Go Dale!

  • Hmm, Covad, Speedstream, 608/128, sounds just like what I got hooked up last week. Except I'm getting the service from a third party. In my case I'm getting 540Kbps and I'm 5,000 feet from the telco. My phone line is ancient and runs 100 feet to the demarcation (I'm in an apartment).

    I double checked with my provider on the minimum guarantees, and double checked the contract. They can't guarantee the 608 'cause of noisy lines, etc., but they do firmly guarantee 128 down. No best effort. You either get at least that or you don't pay.
  • I'm still waiting for my DSL install. I'm on the downtown Palo Alto CO, which is out of DSL capacity right now. I could get a cable modem, but the local Cable Co-Op is being acquired by AT&T (in a sweetheart deal for the management of the co-op, in the opinion of some), and no way do I want "@HOME".

    Incidentally, if you get PacBell DSL, you're not allowed to use it to criticise PacBell Internet Services. Read the service agreement.

  • Hi!

    Note: I wrote that you should call your legislator--not the PUC. The PUC has a vested interested in protecting the regulated monopolies--the more regulations, the more work for the regulators. The PUC won't do diddly except send you photocopied pages of tariffs. (Although they can tell you what tariff hikes are presently proposed and when you can testify regarding them.)
  • Even though I'm posting toward the end of this, I gotta say it.

    George Gilder, as usual, is full of bullshit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making better use of the existing copper plant, which is what DSL does. Pulling fiber to the home user (and even to many businesses) also does not make sense in any kind of real-world economics I know about, in cases where there is DSL-capable copper (and there are certainly situations where that is not the case).

    DSL simply uses the 98% of the available wire capacity that Plain Old Voice never touched. It's clever in how it does so, but the basic principle is very simple.

    As the telecom network continues to be built out, I expect to see the gap between the CO and the CPE increasingly filled with fiber, but for the foreseeable future the vast majority especially in home situations will have copper for at least the "last mile."

    But George Gilder never lets basic economics get in the way of a thumping good oversimplification.

    -------

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