[ale] ADSL???

[Chris Ricker]

On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Jonathan Hart wrote:

> Who are you getting your ADSL service from?  
> Are they here in Atlanta?
> 

I get it from US West.  I'm in downtown Salt Lake.  BellSouth is offering
ADSL in parts of Atlanta; see http://www.bellsouth.net/external/adsl/ .
They should have a form some place there which will let you submit your
phone number to see if it's available for you.  At least with US West's
implementation, you have to be within 18,000 feet of a central office....

Typically, you have to buy a digital modem ($200 is what I've heard
BellSouth charges.  Mine's a Cisco 675 ADSL Router / NetSpeed SpeedRunner
204, which I think runs around $300, so that's probably reasonable).  You
also have to pay an initial one-time setup fee (BellSouth charges $100,
which is what US West charged), and then you have a monthly fee (mine's $40,
while BellSouth charges $60).  There's also an on-site installation fee if
you can't talk them into letting you set it up yourself; US West was quite
willing to waive it and let me do the 15 minutes of work, but I hear
BellSouth absolutely refuses to let you do that.  In my case, US West was
running a promotion where they gave me the modem and a 100-baseT ethernet
card (whether you wanted it or not ;-) free and reduced my initial fee, so
that made it even more affordable.

So far, my only complaints:  I signed up back in September, and I just now
got activated, as ADSL's quite popular here and there was that much of a
backlog for digital modems on their end.  Also, when I called tech support
to find out which of the two different possible bridging modes to configure
the digital modem in, they spent about 30 seconds talking to me, concluded
that the hardware was broken, and offered to overnight a new modem /
ethernet card package to me ;-).  While I appreciate their generosity with
hardware, the money would've been better spent on People With Clues to
answer the phone.

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                            kaboom at gatech.edu
                                               chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu