Or maybe not...

[feren]

Well, I just got a status update from the folks at Speakeasy that had a number of problems listed on it, so I gave their tech support department a call and started asking some questions. What I came to find out is that they won't provision my line because my local service is through a 3rd party provider -- AT&T, as I mentioned earlier. They said they will work with 3rd party voice providers in my area such as Verizon, but AT&T isn't cooperative. Keep in mind that I've had this phone line for four days now, and I've already incurred a bill of $63 just to have it installed. Also keep in mind that Speakeasy didn't mention this little snafu with 3rd party providers anywhere on their page or during the order process. According to the tech the bottom line is that if I wanted to get DSL provisioned from SpeakEasy I had to change my service to SBC.

I don't think so.

Grinding my teeth I told the tech to cancel my order, and I couldn't resist a parting shot before ending the call. "I'll go over to Comcast and order a cable modem instead," I said. "How much do you want to bet they don't care who I have phone service with?"

Absolutely astounding. No wonder cable modems are taking dominance over DSL in the broadband market

Comments

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Welcome to DSL hell. No matter who you're getting your phone or DSL service with, SBC owns that wire coming to your house. Now, since SBC sells DSL service, they have an interest in the matter. I have never heard of a non-SBC DSL installation in Northern Illinois that didn't involve some kind of trouble. Usually, SBC has some kind of "technical problem" for weeks on end.

There are so many parties involved. It's SBC's line, AT&T is the voice provider, Speakeasy is the data provider.

I won't say Comcast has been perfect. There are network problems from time to time. They're growing fast, and working hard to put in enough service to keep latency low for the 6pm "rush hour" when everybody gets home and gets on the net.

But for the most part, it just works. Here in Chicago, we're just about to get a speed upgrade to 3000/256.

The initial installation, back in the @home days, took 20 minutes. The installer just added the cable modem like it was another TV box. It's been hooked up the same way for years.

Oh yeah.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

In a move that eventually truly sucked: Sprint was offering 8000/8000 SDSL for a while here in Chicago. It was priced really reasonably, something like $120 a month. We had it at work downtown. It looked like work was going to pay for me to have it at my apartment too.

A few months later, Sprint stopped taking orders. They couldn't make any money on it. My understanding was that SBC was interfering with every single installation. This wasn't a problem at my office downtown, because my office building has a POP for everybody under the sun down in the basement. But for the suburbs...DSL hell.

[amichele2.livejournal.com]

I once had Speakeasy for my ISP, I dropped them quickly when they kept giving me the runaround on things and I only have dialup. So what does that say about them all together?

[yakko.livejournal.com]

Experiences vary from place to place. I was surprised 3yr ago that I went from order to Speakeasy DSL in 2 weeks. It would've been faster had SBC had a free pair in the can for Covad's loop (uh-huh...)

Last year, SBC stole that pair out from under me, but Speakeasy had them back out there and the loop working the next day.

I've been very happy with the service. We'll see how it goes when I move and have to do a lineshare install (IF Speakeasy is even present at the CO where I end up. I may just keep Time-Warner and go colo for the stuff that needs to stay static)

From what I've heard from others...

[yakko.livejournal.com]

I'd rather use SBC DSL than Comcast. High prices for not-so-good service, bandwidth caps, they block ports, you're not allowed to have VPNs going, etc...

But seeing how your whole point was to get away from SBC, I can understand why you're considering them.

But what is the problem here? It's not like their loop is in a different CO or anything. What broadband options does AT&T offer? What other broadband is available?

I'm fearing the move, then, because I have a separate loop owned by Covad right now, but to get service now, I'd have to 1) have a voice landline (from SBC, judging from your experience); 2) share DSL with the voice line. I'm heavily considering colocation in an effort to open broadband options and make things cost less.

Re: From what I've heard from others...

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

AT&T bought out what was left of Northpoint, I believe.

When I first read the post, I was enraged -- not at Feren, of course, but that the LECs can't stop their petty, self-serving bickering. Policies the LECs put in place to try to drive more customers to their own DSL service ends up leaving a bitter taste in the customer's mouth.

I do have half a mind, though, to tap out a quick note to Kat Oak. The problem is that even if SE posts a warning about this during their sign-up process, it might deter more people who don't want to risk the trouble than it helps CTA in the cases where things go horribly, horribly wrong.

Re: From what I've heard from others...

[ronbar.livejournal.com]

@home and then Comcast have never blocked my port 443 inbound, which is what I run sshd on. I forward a local port on the Windows machine at work to the squid port on my home machine, then use Mozilla Firebird on my work machine to browse with all browser cache and history disabled and images and page-specified fonts and font sizes turned off so it doesn't look like I'm goofing off if somebody walks in on me. So much misdirection to avoid network nazis examining proxy logs for non-work-related browsing...

None of my co-workers bother to disguise their browsing and they don't seem to have any problems with management, but I'm over-paranoid about it now after the way my last job ended.

Re: From what I've heard from others...

[ronbar.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the network nazis at work notice that the traffic they're allowing for me on port 443 is not https. Probably not.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

When we moved into our previous house 8 years ago, we were unable to get DSL because we were 3BLOCKS out of their service area. Yes, our friend 3 blocks away had it, but we couldn't. So we went with ISDN, which worked great and didn't cost too much, that is until we began needing long distance service. Apparently, with ISDN, you can only have business class long distance, which is $.63 a minute. Immediately, I called the cable company and had a cable modem installed. No more trouble!

So, when we moved into the new house, we just went right to cable modem. Comcast was out installing the modem and the tv cable within a few days. Nothing like the wait your DSL was telling you, Feren. I highly recommend the cable modem. Yeah, it gets a little slower in the evenings, but it sounds like they're working on that.

[captain18.livejournal.com]

The sad truth of it is, doing anything third-party through AT&T Local is nigh on impossible.

A quick insight into the inner workings of long distance service:

When you receive correctional facility calls, what happens in most cases is a particular vendor has the franchise to a particular facility. That vendor then passes the billing for those calls on to the local carrier, provided that the local carrier will accept those calls for billing. In the case of MCI (the case I'm familar with) calling 1-800-Collect or using a dial-around like 10-10-220 is billed the same way if you don't use MCI or Telecom*USA as your LD provider: the charges pass to the local carrier for collection.

Virtually every local carrier that serves more than five exchanges agrees to bill for these charges -- with one very notable exception.

Can you guess which one?

[posicat.livejournal.com]

Give TDS Metrocom a call, they had us up and running very quickly, I wanna say less than 2 weeks. They beat their target voice install date by 1 day, and sent an awesome DSL router as soon as the DSL was active (5 days later)

We have their 256/256 service, which is fine for what we use, I may spend the additional $10 to boost things up to 786/786. They also don't seen to care what you do with your connection, they're your bits.