RCN vs Mediaone cable modem experiences?

[Rich Braun]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> You could do much better with xDSL service. My office mate lives in 
> Bedford, just signed up for SDSL (2 lines each is 400Kbps), which will cost 
> him about $80.00/Mo. ...

Note the word "will".  About 400,000 DSL lines have been installed worldwide
today, against a few million cable lines.  I work for a company which has
0.1% of the global market share.  DSL has been giving us absolute fits:
even though demand for DSL is such that it out-sells T1 by 10 to 1, the
rate of installations is far slower than with T1 or cable.

The problem with DSL is it's a business-grade service with special
requirements, and provisioning is done by each ILEC (in our case, Bell
Atlantic).  A lot of companies have jumped on the xDSL bandwagon, and
quite frankly the sales folks are having a field day taking orders well
along the upward tilt of the "hockey stick" volume curve while the
installation techs at Bell Atlantic are languishing along the horizontal
section of that same curve.

Demand far outstrips supply.  The results are horrendous provisioning delays,
which make the cable company's signup process look like a cakewalk.

The good news is xDSL works well once it's in, and it rarely breaks.  The
bad news is it takes a long time to fix when it does break.

Massive investments in our market by Bell Atlantic, HarvardNet, and
the three publicly-traded xDSL vendors (Rhythms, Covad, Northpoint)
pretty much guarantee that xDSL will be a force to be reckoned with,
and there are an awful lot of deep-pockets investors counting on fixes
to the provisioning problems.  But I don't see it happening within the
next few months.  I know a fair amount about what's going on inside
Bell Atlantic, and although their development projects are remarkable and
encouraging, it will take another year or so to get deployment to run
as smoothly as second-line residential phone service.

I'd love to hear stories from people here who get xDSL at home or work.

I think my earlier comments about static-IP addressing still apply with
DSL.  Since the service tends to cost more than $50/month, you can probably
get one static IP with it--but you probably have to ask ahead of time just
how static it is.

-rich
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