Verizon DSL questions

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| Yes they just opened ad POP in boston before we were using NY.
| You can't go wrong with speakeasy I been with them 6 month...
| and they are growing like crazy.. cause each ISP that when down example(flashcom) they got all theyr customers..
| so Covad/speakeasy are getting all the dsl clients at least the more technical people that nees to have servers,linux support
| and a good SDSL conexion.

I looked into speakeasy a couple months ago, and it seemed  at  first
that we'd get a DSL connection through them.  Finally, they said that
we couldn't actually get DSL at our house, and the best they could do
was  the kind that's actual ISDN at a price of around $350 per month.
So, since RCN was in the process of infecting this  neighborhood,  we
went with them instead.

I'd have to say that everyone I  talked  to  or  got  email  from  at
speakeasy   was  helpful,  knowledgeable,  and  all  that,  and  duly
apologetic over the difficulties getting accurate  info  out  of  the
phone company.  I'd be tempted to consider them seriously when and if
real DSL comes to our neighborhood.  Contrary to RCN's  claims,  I've
seen  a lot of periods of < 1 Kb/sec rates, sometimes lasting half an
hour or more. I can do a bit of checking by logging in to a couple of
other  machines where I have accounts and fetching the same URLs from
there, and seeing a much higher transfer rate.  This proves that it's
not a slow server at the other end that's causing the slowdown.

I've also seen a lot of cases of completely hung connections,  and  a
traceroute shows that the bottleneck is a router whose fqdn ends with
".rcn.com", with no pings getting past that point.

(Actually, I wrote a little wish script that does the traceroute  and
then sets up a table of pings to all the hosts along the way, showing
me just where the bottleneck is.  Tcl is useful for  simplifying  and
clarifying such tasks.)

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