DSL has just come to town (Buffalo, NY). Of course, once Bell Atlantic set up shop, the competition is in too. Bell wants $40 a month for a 640/90kbps line. They don’t even offer anything above 90k for upload. A 1500/90 line is like $100 or so. Free install, but they want $100 for a DSL modem, plus I have to buy and install a NIC (probably another $25).
Earthlink is offering a 1500/384k line for $49 a month. Free install, free NIC, free modem. Of course, they don’t guarantee 1.5mb, but I’m two blocks from the CO, so I should get pretty damned close. It’s a 6 month contract.
I’m skeptical. Sounds too good to be true? It probably is. I know service varies quite a bit by location, but if anyone has experience with Earthlink DSL, I’d appreciate your opinion.
I have Earthlink DSL in Seattle. I’m about 2000 ft from the CO, I get about 1.3 MBPS. When that recently dropped to about 300 Kbps for reasons unknown, Earthlink support actually spent about 6 hours of phone time spread out over 4 days to help me trace the problem and fix it (corrupt TCP on my PC, not easy to trace or fix…). Bottom line is, I think they’re as good as their word.
i have Bell Atl. Infospeed 640 kb/s, I personally love it, but it does sound like earthlike is offering alot more for only $10 per month. I didn’t know about them when I ordered. I told my friend about this. She wanted to get dsl so she called up, they said it was not yet in her area but Bell Atl. is. She is tired of waiting and will probally go w/ bell.
Besides speed here are some diffrences I have noticed
Earthlink uses Covad Comunications who lease their lines from bell- to actually get this going you will need a visit from covad then from bell and covad - sometimes this takes time.
Covad will install everything for you - bell will give you a kit to do it your self - you will be charged if a tech needs to come over to complete instilation.
bell offers 1 free month - if they are late they will sometimes offer an additional month, you must buy the modem and microfilters for $110 , you only need a network card if you get an external lan modem (recomended if you will hook up more then 1 comp to dsl, or already have a nic), you can get the usb or internal dsl modem and don’t have to buy a card. ( i recomend getting the card, it allows expansion and costs less the $20)- and you can cancel at anytime - I think earthlink has a 1 yr contract.
You might think once you have dsl, you can never go back, this is only true if dsl works good for you, if not then it can be a nightmare (slowdowns/dropped connection). and it’s good to have a way out.