Verizon DSL question

[mcmanus at ducksong.com (Patrick R. McManus)]

There's a little too much verizon bashing going on in this thread
without any first hand stories. While I was skeptical going in, I
actually have this service and have been satisfied with it.

[Drew Taylor: Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 09:41:47AM -0400]
> At 09:29 AM 4/30/02 -0400, David Kramer wrote:
> 
> >Unfortunately, my friend already has the service, and as usual, is
> >counting on me to pick up the pieces and make it work.
> 
> And IIRC, Verizon locks you into a nice long contract (>= 1 yr) and charges 
> a few hundred to break it. My friend had to pay up when he moved into his 
> new house in Westford.

this is not true; right now anyhow with the consumer infospeed
service. I have the service and its month to month. My first month was
free. If I should cancel in the first 12 months I would have to return
the dsl modem they provided for free. I've been pleased with the
service.

one thing to consider when selecting a dsl provider is that no matter
whom you select, verizon will always be in the mix because its their CO
and their copper - when you are a verizon customer and you have a
problem with one of those systems they have an incentive to fix it,
when you are a (speakeasy/covad/et al) customer and have a problem
with one of those systems they have a DIS-incentive to fix problems
that hurt their competitors service. Stories abound regarding the unethical
practices of ILECs on competing DSL provider's circuits - I'm not
condoning it, but one way to run around the problem is just use
verizon.

I have less outages than when I was on mediaone/at&t cable service
(when I moved to Boston at&t BB was unavailable here.) Verizon does
annoyingly block incoming port 80 - but only port 80 - and as with
most providers that was in reaction to code red/nimda. Bandwidth is
always as advertised. Latency is tiny. IP Address stability is non
existant with this service - your IP is as good as your PPPoE session,
which is generally a few weeks or so - but you will be renumbered upon
renogiating. Again, to me this was the same problem as the cable modem
just a little more frequent - but I had a solution in place anyhow so
the frequency on that granularity didn't matter.

The install didn't require a service call - so I didn't have to
arrange time away from work for it. No install fee or monthly rentals
either.

I know the conventional wisdom is to diss PPPoE but I can only think
of one technical reason to dislike it - IP fragmentation. This can be
sovled by just turning down the MTU on any home LAN links you might
have. Mostly, its just like running any other tunnel. In its favor -
PPPoE brings authentication into an application layer where it belongs
instead of relying on hacks like MAC addresses (of both cable modem
and host) which are more susceptible to hackery/spoofery and create
significant support headaches for both customer and vendor.

I'm picky about my networks. I was skeptical of verizon. For a
consumer grade service though, it has exceeded my expectations.

-P