Does Pacbell DSL ever get better?

[lipsons]

I just signed up w/ PACBELL DSL last week. So far it's been down more days than up. Should I cut my losses now and go with earthlink, or will I just have the same headache?

-Steve

[Dave_7]

Mine tended to stall out for periods of time... it does it less often now.



Dave.

[paulc]

In the last 14 months, I think I've had 5-10 days where email was not available, a few days when DNS lookup was out for hours at a time and maybe a total of 10 hours when the service was completely out (blinking red led on my router). During most of the downtime, dialup service was available and working.

Not too bad overall, especially since download speed has remained pretty steady at 1.5Mbits/s (only 384Kbits/s is guaranteed) for 14 months. Too bad upload speed is capped at 128Kbits/s.

OTOH, a guy where I work who also has PacBell DSL has constant outages. But my work PacBell DSL line has as little trouble as my home line (almost always up). I guess service varies widely.

[japetty]

SBC has a real problem when it comes to being an ISP. SBC is a Dial tone company and you could call them a network company cause they are one of the companies that provide the last mile of communications. Your DSL if not wireless, Satellite or cable will be your telco no mater who your ISP is that you choose. FWIW I would say Earthlink is a better ISP, with Earthlink as your ISP you will have someone as CLEC then the local dial tone company will carry your DSL to your house. With Pac Bell you have PacBell/ASI. Either of these 2 is not easy to do business with at this point. Once I got my DSL installed it has worked OK but have experienced outages of the mail server often. The DSL itself has been down for about 18 hours at one time but only a few hours at other times. I have used DSL with SBC (PacBell) now for 6 months. Tech Support may as well not even exist because all they know is recycle reboot re-install then hand you off to the next person and the process starts all over again. I don't know about the dial up because from where I live the dial up is a long distance call that PacBell charges you $.09 a min to call.

[Edited by japetty on 04-24-2001 at 04:31 PM]

[lipsons]

It turns out that I am not 9000ft from the telco, but I'm 10,500 feet. They are telling me that my connection will not be reliable. I guess its back to dialup for me till the cable company can bail me out!!

-Steve

[japetty]

I am 14,000 from the PACBELL CO and my connection is very reliabe. Don't let them BS you like that. Tell them to fix it. Since they capped me because they did not want me to have packet loss I am always at 628, before they capped I was at 1220 and I did not notice packet loss.