[Tfug] broadband opts

[Dennis McCormick]

Back when I only used Windows several years ago (ME then) I tried US 
West DSL. I went the cheap route whereas the connection had to be 
established each time rather than an always-on. I saved $5 or $10 each 
month I think for a connection that was 5 times faster than dial up. I 
would come home from work at midnight and try to get a connection from 
the modem pool. One would think in the middle of night there would be 
plenty of connections. Wrong! Many times from midnight to 2 am my 
computer would try continuously and not get a connection. During the day 
a connection could be made at times. After a couple of weeks of this the 
dial tone became lost on the voice side. DSL would still work though. A 
service call fixed that within two days. A couple of days after that 
when someone dialed my phone number the call went to someone else's 
phone! I tried this myself from my own home phone number and I got a 
woman's answering machine. DSL was canceled immediately after this was 
fixed. I went back to dial up but the highest receive speed ever since 
has been 26 kbps while before DSL it was 53 kbps.

My cable modem experience went well when Excite at Home was my ISP. 
However, it went out of business and Cox took over. I received a CD-ROM 
and a couple of sheets of instructions from Cox. The instructions stated 
that the transfer to Cox had to be done within a certain short time 
period for all customers. Ok, the CD-ROM went into my Windows machine 
and it started grinding away. Many unusual programs were started, 
various servers that I had never heard of and ZoneAlarm was asking for 
so many accesses I decided to abort the installation of Cox's CD-ROM. I 
wanted to talk to Cox but all the tech support lines were extremely 
busy. Even tech support on the web was not accessible. I tried for a 
couple of days to get through both ways. I never did and my computer's 
hard drive contents were left in an unstable state. It was necessary to 
wipe the hard drive and reload Windows and associated programs. I took 
the cable modem out of my system and went down to Winsett street and 
slapped it down on their counter and said to cancel my account.

So it's been dial up ever since these experiences. I may try Cox next 
year or so as I now use mostly Linux. Things may go better with this OS. 
I think that Cox has perhaps loosened up in that it allows up to 4 
computers to use the same connection now. It didn't back when I tried 
it. I'll really waiting for WiMax to come in.

Good luck, Dennis McCormick

dave jordan wrote:
> Hi Peoples.
> 
> I am about to switch my home broadband provider from Cox 4.0 mbps
> cable to Qwest 1.5 mbps dsl.  The order is in, it's basically a done
> deal.
> 
> ....
> what does the list think of Cox v. Qwest?
> 
> -dave
> _______________________________________________