o.t any opinions on sbc dsl service????

LOUSY customer service and if you ahve any hardware problems or hookup problems, they get you right in the arse with outrageous charges.

That was my experience anyway, and of past neighbors as well OH and the people that bought our house out there. Central California.

KJK

I don't use their DSL service, but I am stuck with their phone service, and the customer service is horrid. Several of my PC customers use their service, and I haven't heard much good about it. I use Road Runner, and have been relatively happy with them. The price is more, but decent customer service, and very good reliability are worth the price to me.

Chris

I think your on the wrong newgroup.

philthy proclaimed:

If you get lucky and get a good install, it tends to be rather reliable, better than Comcrap for instance. Several folks at the office use it and in our group, the Comcrap seems to go out more often than the SBC DSL.

The tricky parts will be getting it ordered without hassle, getting it installed without hassle, and say your prayers if it ever does appear that you have a problem with the DSL service itself, as they make even Comcrap's clueless phone apes look like a CCNE.

If you have Covad in your area, I dunno if they are still as good as they used to be, they are a bit more expensive but have been known to hire people with actual computer experience.

I love it

My experience with DSL is that it is better to use the provider that has a "special" arrangement with your local phone company. There are always hidden surprises, but this is the way to minimize them. Switching DSL providers is nothing but a nightmare. If you picked the wrong one, you are screwed. I had a lot of problems with Qwest and various DSL providers, until I figured out that Qwest really wanted me to use MSN DSL service. Sure the other services worked, but there was just a lot of foot dragging, except with MSN.

Earle

Earle has a good sentiment here. I have this type of arrangement with no problems. Sprint has an arrangement with Earthlink and because of that they seem to flange up well with each other. Tomes

Don't have much experience with DSL but i love my Cox High Speed Internet. Have heard that people that do have trouble with DSL cannot often get it resolved.

That is one of the best summaries of the problems with DSL, that I have ever read. It's great, until you have a problem.

Earle

I had StarBand at first, which doesn't use a phone return line either. It was nothing but problems. Your local installation is also a transmitter, so you have to have a "certified installer" install it. Where I live they want $100 just to drive out there. The big problem is that with satellite return, the delay to ping somebody on the net is at least a half second, more like a whole second in practice. Lots of servers (web sites mostly) have problems with that. StarBand used caching software on their servers, to try to make up for this lack. It was crashing and overloading all the time, and it appears also that the company had a habit of oversubscribing and thereby overloading the servers. I have heard that the DirecWay satellite return systems are prone to the same sort of problems.

I finally got fed up and bought a DirecWay phone line system (old name DirecPC) just before they stopped selling them. It has performed faithfully and with very few interruptions for more than three years. It uses a phone line for upload, but what the Hell. On the very few times it has been down, I simply used the phone to connect.

I wonder why Spanish has a word for "Son's Mother-in-law" but English doesn't?

Earle

Me Suegra? I think it origanally started as a curse word, but evolved into 'mother in law'

Yes, but in the English language, 'mother-in-law' IS a curse.

You prefer disagreements with your son's mother?

I probably do not know what this is all about, *but* I am on Starband satellite, and when I press the "send" button the message goes out from my antenna to the satellite. Starband has the license and I am "leasing" a portion of their bandwidth. Same with the satellite phone I had overseas. The license is for the frequency, whether the transmitter sends to a satellite or a terrestrial tower. The user is, by extension, granted a license by the company that has the frequency rights. But maybe I probably do not know what the situation is?

First, my condolences for being on StarBand. Second, you are mostly right about the legal situation. That is why you had to pay someone to install your system, who was a representative of StarBand. That way, only "authorized personnel" got to play with the alignment of the transmitted signal. If they had screwed it up and caused problems, it would have been StarBand culpable, not you.

In my case, the antenna is receive-only, so there is no (legal) fault that attaches to a bad installation.

Earle