And while I am fussing, don't give me an appointment to fix my internet on friday, not show up, then when I call be informed they are two days, count them, two days behind on appointments. I give them my cell phone number to give the repair guy so he can call me when he needs me home, and when he gets here, his work order said "no contact number."

So, anybody like Roadrunner?

I've had Roadrunner for a few months. The service guy showed up within the window, and even called before he got here. However, I've been told that the installation guys are all hired out locally, so it'll depend on the region.

DSL is intrinsically lousy because it's the Phone Company, which has been subject to 30 years of regulation, deregulation, union contracts, etc. Plus they have to work with a wire network that was designed in the 1930s; in some houses the wiring is 30's vintage too. And most importantly, the DSL signal isn't on your phone line until some shlub goes down the the switch building near your house and jimmies with some baling wire and bubblegum to connect some wires. And those shlubs are notoriously unreliable.

Cable, on the other hand, has enjoyed an unfettered monopoly from the git-go. And the wires date from the 1970s at the oldest. And so when the cable industry decided to invest in broadband, it was much, much simpler for them to build something worthwhile. And to make it all easy, the internets are already present on the cable wire, so all the tech has got to do is unfurl the sail, and the next thing you know, yer surfin' the internets.

DSL sucks.

What Triode said. However, to those of us for whom DSL (ADSL, here, actually, which is even worse) is the best thing we can get, it is like manna from heaven when it finally becomes available.

If it makes you feel any better, bunnyfire, I just got my mother connected with ADSL and we now find that she is getting regular outages throughout the day, but the provider only has support during business hours. During business hours, I am 60km away from the house. my mother is not the most technically-minded person (she initially thought the outages were too mnay people using the internet at once), so can't help diagnose. I am going to have to take a day off work to sort it out. Anybody like Exetel?

I just don't like how cable goes down randomly and too often for my taste.

I was wondering where you were, miss fire!

Heh, my dsl went out recently and I suffered without it for over two days. My personal tech guy was out of town (mr. taz), and I called the provider who said it was fine and online, and the phone company who said it was fine, so I changed my settings eleventy billion times, and still no luck.

Finally, I broke down and called a computer guy to come fix the stupid thing. He comes in and has a look for about 15 seconds, jiggles the modem plugin, and taaa-daah, it's on! Boy, did I feel stupid.

Eh, I've had waaay more problems with Cable than DSL.

But usually my problems are things like having all my bandwidth sucked up by users on my local loop, or their DNS goes down, or the modem just dies, etc. Everything else I can usually fix myself, even if it means tracing and testing my lines to the trunk (or cable distribution amplifier.)

But I live in the southwest where phone lines are generally newer, often times equal in age to cable lines, and central offices abound.

Here I get 10-15 MB down and a guaranteed 1 MB up on Qwest DSL, and often much more than 1mb up - and I legitimately send a lot of large data files. The fastest cable offering here (Cox) is advertised at 9 MB down (realistically 6 or much less, say 1) and an advertised 512-768 kbps up (realistically 50-300k or less!)

With DSL I don't share with neighbors - housemates, yeah. I get nearly zero flags on my firewall (outside of standard internet-wide netblock scanning fare and script kiddies, and they never see me anyway 'cause everything's shut off, and they're just scanning IP ranges) and the service speeds are guaranteed. Cable doesn't do that.

A friend of mine out in California gets 25mb down and up - to his home. And he can run an actual server without violating his TOS. Heck, he can run multiple servers and suck up all his available bandwidth 24/7 for the length of his contract. He gets multiple hard IPs. He can route real DNS to his house or run virtual hosts or DNS pointers, and he can even call the support line for help if he has actual connection/routing glitches he can't fix. He (and I) also don't get filtered, portscanned, probed, or bandwidth-shaped. Cable doesn't do that either.

Cable companies love to shape your traffic, block useful ports and otherwise offer a less than complete internet connection. Because they have to, because in most neighborhoods the physical network topology makes everyone in a local loop behave something like a LAN. (I still remember being able to browse win98 "shared folders" across huge segments of local loop when cable was still pretty new. "Hi neighbor! Nice collection of horse pr0n ya got there!")

What cable did do for me is hijack an unpatched windows/IE machine in a whopping 20-30 seconds. (I couldn't find the power brick for my firewall/router combo, and I needed to get some info online ASAP.) I hadn't even launched IE yet. Browser hijacked, netmsgs everywhere, and what appeared to be about a half a dozen directory traversal worms from my neighbors. Brand spanking new install, again, foolishly unpatched. Thankfully I had the foresight to just yank my good drives and throw in one I didn't mind wiping, which I did before doing anything else with the computer later.

I'm too far outside of 'town' to expect DSL service in my lifetime (but of course, the New AT&T puts an ad for it in my snailbox weekly). Fortunately, Charter cable's cable internet has been functioning for me constantly since I moved here (and the cable installer came smack dab in the middle of the 'window' - unprecedented service for me). As of 2 minutes ago, I'm running 3Mb down and 250kb up, and (knock-on-wooden-head) haven't been attacked yet. I got a new-customer-promotional-package with internet and cable TV (70 main-tier channels, 40 digital channels including BBC America, plus all the variations of HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz and Encore) for $75/month which was supposed to be the first three months, after which the pay channels would be extra and I would probably cancel all of them (not even Tombstone excites me anymore... most of my TV viewing is research for my writing) but I'm still getting charged the same monthly into my ninth month here. (Shhhh... don't tell anybody)

And, oh yeah, because I do use both the internet and TV in my "work", and I have two computers (one with Media Center to watch TV on the desktop) and an extra TV set, I have a documented separation of personal and work-related on both services and can deduct half of whatever I pay Charter on my taxes as a "business expense". This is one of the ways I feel like a lucky duck these days.

Hmmm...a lot of food for thought here.

Meanwhile Sprint has been trumpeting their name change to Embarq and I have a permanent bad taste in my mouth for both companies. Nothing like calling tech support for days and hearing dsl is out for the state of NC in total. (A lie according to the really nice phone line guy. Just something they put up to mislead the masses during technical difficulties.)

I've been using Speakeasy (resold SBC imean ATT) for years. Line's reliable enough that I host my dns and mail server off of it.

There was a problem with noise about three years ago. I rewired the stuff on my side of the demarc, which helped some, then went and wiggled wires until I found the other source. Called in a noise complaint, and when the telco guy showed up, I explained that I'm a network geek, not a phone geek, but when I do this, it hurts the S/N ratio on my DSL bridge dropped, which made my line slow, which made the baby jesus cry.

He said "That's good. That's a trackable problem. I can fix that¹." He did voodoo, it became better, he then drove off to a box some distance away and did more voodoo, and it became much better. He came back, I gave him coffee and we chatted about the disconnect between phone and network guys (phone guys are much better at the physical infrastructure, network guys are protocol jockeys.)

I learned a whole bunch that day, and I think he did as well, and ever since then, the DSL has rocked.

The biggest problem with DSL is crappy bridges and routers. The best thing you can do is get a good one -- if you can score a working Cicso 678, you'll find 90% of your DSL problems go away.

1) Test case. If you can give a geek a test case -- "If I open this program, and load this file, it crashes. Every time", or "I have noise. If I wiggle this wire, the noise changes, sometimes better, sometimes worse." -- then they can track down the problem and fix it, since after they try something, they can test to make sure the fix worked.

If at all possible, boil the problem down to a test case. I'm dealing with a server at work that has developed a problem with a random reboot about every three weeks. Finding a fix here is a bitch -- I have to try something, and wait a month to find out if it worked.

The something right now is "swap the drives into another frame", so I've replaced all the hardware in one fell swoop. We'll know sometime in early August.

You can pry my cable modem out of my cold, dead hand.

To be fair, I've had better support with cable - well, kinda, but I hate their terms of service and quality of service.

I once had a greenhorn Cox support agent specializing in Macs go totally off script for me. Granted I didn't have phone or net access at my new place, but I also didn't have a phone or landline, and I spent an entire fucking hour waiting for support to answer standing in 110 degree heat at an unshaded payphone. (No 'net makes me go nuts.)

So when I finally got him on the line, I had to explan a number of things. Like, err, I wasn't at my computer and it was impossible to be there. No, I don't run their buggy spyware "client" on my machine. Yes, I run various flavors of windows, linux and sometimes Mac - but it doesn't matter 'cause I use a gateway/router anyway. Yes everything was on, power-cycled and all that.

I think he sensed the desperation in my voice and realized I wasn't a total idiot and something odd was wrong. So he goes out on the net and looks around for me, probably totally fucking his call averages. Turns out that my gateway/router had a known problem of locking up after 1000 DNS lookups. Solution? Upgrade the firmware on it. Duh. Ok, I am an idiot. Worked flawlessly. (I would have eventually figured it out and resorted to setting it back to factory defaults thus flushing it, but god knows when.)

I actually went back to the payphone, called the number again, waited another 30 minutes, asked for the shift manager, gave him my case number and thanked him profusely, and told him that kid needed a raise or a promotion to level 2. The manager was stunned, saying something like "Wait, I'm confused. You're not calling about a problem? You're not calling to bitch about someone or something? No one ever calls back to thank us... thank you!"