[OT] Re: DSL Coming -- I may need help! : My ranting :)

On Mon, Feb 28, 2000 at 10:09:48PM -0800, Bruce Lane wrote: (I don't have DSL but...) I think the point is that the quality varies and there are no guarantees. I have a friend who moved to Ann Arbor, MI, a year or so ago (since moved on to Redmond, WA, the horror!) and he went out of his way to choose an apartment based on it being in a DSL service area. Apparently for the first several months he had the line, it was *far* slower than a dialup modem connection. There was just something freakishly wrong with it, but it did eventually get the bytes through so of course, he still had to pay his bill. Eventually the phone co. tweaked something and got decent performance out of it but he wasn't too happy. I have Road Runner here (the Albany NY area was one of the test markets so we got it way early, our payback seems to be, no DSL even though everyone else in the world has that already), and it's another one of these things with wonderful theoretical max numbers, but the real-life numbers are all over the place. Sometimes I can get 200 KByte/second FTP speeds, other times it's so slow that my telnet connections drop. And I love the fact that when I connect from my home Linux box to dbit.com, the connection goes from here, to Boston, to New Jersey, then finally to dbit.com which is located at the ISP two blocks from my house. So I guess they're too cheap to make *real* routing deals. John Wilson D Bit