I have had Verizon DSL service for almost two years now. I’ve been paying $75 per month. You see, in Metropolis, Illinois, Verizon doesn’t have any residential DSL service yet. The workaround is that an ISP, such as NeonDSL can lease the line for their own use from Verizon. They then pass that charge ($39.99) onto me, along with their internet subscription charge of $34.99.
From about five to six years ago, when broadband really first hit this area, my experiences with cable internet at my friends’ homes was ridiculous. They had ONE concentrator and the service wasn’t even two-way...it required a phone line for uploads. Well, last year is the first that they began offering cable internet on this side of the river. I presumed that it would still be backwater crappy technology cobbled together so that they could pretend they were offering a service. So I was “happy” with my 728kb/128kb DSL service with a static IP address, and always-on status. Not once in two years did I have a service interruption or need to reboot my modem. Read on to discover why I had no choice to drop that plan and what happened as a result.
I had to switch my phone line to be classified as a business line, or legally, they claim, my yellowpages ad for my company could only be listed as my name and not my business name. Real professional, right? So anyway, I switched it to a commercial line.
This allowed me the opportunity to use Verizon for my DSL service, since they do offer business DSL locally. And $15 cheaper than the ridiculous price I’m paying now. Long story short--the whole process to switch would either leave me with a month and a half of downtime, or with a proposed second-line solution which would leave me with no downtime, but take three months to complete and hundreds of dollars in various “new service” fees. Oh, and Verizon says that they would have to notify NeonDSL that I was now a commercial line, which would likely cause Neon to start charging me for business DSL service--$115 a month.
Angrily, I called Comcast Cable. I asked them if I had to sign a term agreement, and I don’t, so I ordered it. Prepared for a long waiting period, they installed it the very next day, not 16 hours after I ordered it. This morning I tested my DSL, and I had a 110kb upload and 580kb download speed. As soon as the cable modem booted, I did a speed test. 180kb upload, and 2800kb download! Geebus what’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I do this a long time ago?
Oh, and cost? It’s cheaper for me to have my internet if I have basic cable service, despite the fact that I have and am happy with my satellite package, so my internet is now $45 a month, plus $10 for basic cable. $20 cheaper and 5 times as fast.
I hope the Google mail reports today aren’t April Fool’s jokes, but I’m sure that they are. If it’s not, then I’ll be jumping on board with that so I can avoid having to go through the hassle of changing my email address in a thousand site profiles that I have.
Posted Thursday April 1, 2004
in Real Life by Derek Jones
This is an older entry and as such, it may be by a guest author or contain formatting problems / extraneous code. If you notice something wrong with the entry, please use the Contact page to let me know the entry title and issue.
See, that’s where having your own domain name comes in real handy. Whenever I sign up for something, register at a site, etc. it’s always {that domain name} @lethargynet.com.
I can’t even remember the last time I used an email address associated with how I got ‘net access. I suppose it was back in college when I had an @tamu.edu address. Even then, though, I didn’t really use it much since I had other, more “portable” addresses.
I’m kind of torn on the whole Gmail thing, BTW. Obviously, the timing is suspicious, other that that I don’t really think their proposal is outlandish. Sure, you hear the “1 Gigabyte of storage!” claims and immediately think “no way”.
But it’s not like you’ll just be able to upload a 100MB file to the account and use it as a storage service. It’s for emails. I mean, I guess you might be able to break up your 100MB file into 100 1MB files and forward all of them to the account for storage, but what kind of miniscule fraction of a percent of users would do that? The vast, vast, vast majority would probably never hit 10MB.
Besides, they don’t have to have all the storage ready to go at launch. It can be added as needed. With storage capacities on drives increasing like they are right now, adding capacity as needed in the future could be quite economic. [shrug]
Besides, I think the job I just posted about is their April Fool’s joke. But who knows.
By Chris Curtis on April 1, 2004 at 01:21pm link