[ale] recommended personal DSL provider for Alpharetta ?

[James P. Kinney III]

Hi Courtney,

DSL: your bandwidth is YOUR bandwidth. System doesn't slow down when the
kids get home from school because they are on the cable modem shared
bandwidth with you. DSL runs over phone line and is ultimately managed
by the telco (Bellsouth for most, AllTell for the truly unfortunate).
DSL is quite reliable and robust as long as the dialtone techs don't
make a mess. In most cases, DSL will be slower on the download than the
cable modem will. DSL will generally be a bit faster on the upload.

Cable: Generally faster download. Customer service even worse than phone
company (service outage will be repaired in MOST cases in days, not
hours). Cable is geared for non-tech, home consumer mentality. If all
you want is low-cost high speed download and service glitches won't
clobber you, cable is a great choice.

If you plan on working from home and you absolutely MUST have a reliable
access method, DSL is a better choice.

The "naked" DSL from places like Speakeasy cost more that the
traditional shared line DSL. The signalling is different and the
head-end connection is different. It is closer to T1 than ISDN.

If you MUST HAVE solid connection for work (or you will be running
servers), you need a connection package that has SLA's. 

Cable modem has no SLA ability (NOTE: I have NOT seen the new business
cable packages term yet - it may be an option). SLA packages will cost
more. But it means if an outage occurs, you are not appended tot he end
of the list. You get inserted near the top.

The general rule is still "you get what you pay for".

I use Speakeasy. I have used BellSouth and Mindspring->Earthlink DSL
(and ISN and T1 and dialup...). The customer service from Speakeasy is
fantastic. It is the best customer service I have ever seen in nearly
every IT/telcom arena. And it does cost me more than what I could get
elsewhere. But I run servers and I want the upload speed. So I pay for
768k upload and multiple static IPs on two separate lines.
Load-balancing gives me T1 upload for under the price of a 1/4 T1.

Speakeasy speaks Linux quite happily. The wiring infrastructure is
handled by Covad. I can also recommend Covad with no reservations
either. The few issues I or my Speakeasy clients have had, Covad has
responded in record time (compared to the other connection options) and
the issue was resolved and the solution communicated back to me (not
just a "service restored" notice. I like knowing what went on so I can
refer back to that sympton if I see it again.).

On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 09:43 -0400, Courtney Thomas wrote:
> I'm now ready to move, up hopefully,   :-)   to DSL.
> 
> What are my choices and the dis/advantages of each, please ?
> 
> Among the tolerable, who is the least expensive  ?
> 
> As always, thanks,
> 
> Courtney
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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