OT: was Facial Hair... now New Speeds available

[John Esak]

> PS - And as proof that DSL just does not measure up to a T1 for stability,
> today was a gem.  No storms, no nothing.  I suddenly went to 76% packet
> loss, +15ms additional latency (25ms avg instead of 15ms), and pretty much
> an unusable net.  I called IgLou, and while I'm talking to the guy, my
> phone starts acting like it's a bad cell phone connection with
> intermittant
> to no signal.  I figured I'd have to call BellSouth.  About 5min later I'm
> still checking things out and I see pings go up to 700ms, then
> 1600ms, then
> drop back down to 300ms and finally down to 15ms like normal.  I call the
> same guy back and he said that it wasn't just me, two other people called
> in with problems right after me, and he spoke with one directly--and they
> had the same voice line problems I did.  Mine and theirs cleared up at the
> same time.
>
> Now if that'd been a business-critical uplink in terms of -needing- a
> presence there 24/7, there'd be problems, especially had the weirdness
> lasted longer than the 20min it did.  I maintain:  Anyone dropping their
> leased lines for DSL and dropping their LD or even phone for VOIP
> is asking
> for problems.  That's about the closest I've seen to my phone
> service going
> dead, and at least it was marginal (-real- marginal) for usability.  The
> net was shot though.  At best, a bursty 5KB/sec at one point during the
> spurts it worked, acting like it had intermittent sync (it didn't
> lose sync
> though).
>
> Sure, it was fixed in 20min.  And had it not been, and had I hopped on the
> Vonage bandwagon like so many have?  S.O.L.  (Not counting my cell phone.)
> At least I could more or less talk to support yet on voice.  There's no
> way VOIP would have worked at all--I couldn't even use ssh more than a few
> dozen characters every 20 seconds in bursts.
>
> And that's several days after the storm system that took sync away for
> about 1.5 hours straight here the other night.
>
> I'd again advise anyone thinking about switching to rethink things.

Mark,
Hate to make you jealous and crazy... :-) but I was going to put this up
next week once we are installed.... your post seemed like as good an
opportunity as anything, though.


With the new Verizon 30Mb down and 5Mb up OPTICAL service now available in
our area... Scott just got it for his home. (this is residential version...
things look REALLY good for switching from the old $1440/month T1 service.
Why? Becuase it is $44.95 per month!!!!!!!!  It also has 3 phone jacks
should you widh to buy Vo/IP from them as well. Yeesh, they bring an optical
line right to your house (no charge for installation!). This is
unfortunately or FORTUNATELY too hard to pass up. There business service is
$389 per month! Let's see, $389 from $1440 that's less, right???? :-)

My God a savings of about $1k per month.  I'll *take* the possibility of a
fe tiny outages.... Hell, I have a fail over dial-up line, and the new Sonic
Walls provide fail over DSL as well.

Incidetnally, the business optical service is 30Mb down and 10Mb up.

Also, the cable people here Optimum Online are also offering 30Mb service
residentially at least... maybe even businesss haven't checked yet though.

We, at least, are moving on up... to the east side...
tad-dah-deeh-dah-dee-... dah-dee-dah! :-)

John