Supposedly this was going to automatically change to the $49.95 price after your year commit (If you had one) was done. I have yet to see it happen and I do not expect it will. However if you move you will be subjected to the new pricing.
mhendo, most of your questions have already been answered by other people here, but I thought I’d chime in as a fellow Verizon & Baltimore customer. So far I’ve had no major problems or outtages to speak of. Once I followed the suggestions at DSLReports, everything has worked pretty well. Download time have been pretty fast. I can’t recall actual numbers, but if you want I can do some tests tonight and report the findings.
Thanks again to everyone for their help. I think i have enough info now, and i’m going to give it a go.
av8rmike, thanks for your offer to do a test, and if you do one i would certainly be interested to hear the results, but don’t go to any trouble. (where are you in B’more? I’m in Charles Village, near Hopkins university)
The consensus seems to be that the service is pretty reliable, and that it is miles faster than dial-up.
The funny thing is, i have also realised after listening to some people here, and after reading some of the reports on the DSL websites people have linked to, that my conception of what is “fast” is already well out of date. Generally, a download speed of 50-100kbps would make my life much easier. I’m not a person who downloads high resolution graphics or music files, or who plays online games; i’m a grad student whose most frequent downloads are from academic journal databases (boring, huh?). These articles are in pdf format, and are usually between 1Mb and 3Mb in size. With a dial-up service these take quite a long time, and if i have quite a few to download i usually queue them in a download manager and let them download overnight while i’m asleep.
If i really want to get a bunch of articles quickly, i walk up to the university where i’m a student and download them in the computer lab, where speeds seem to range from about 80-700kbps, depending on the time of day and the number of other people on the system. If i could get something close to these speeds, i could do it all from home and my life would be much easier. And just having everyday web pages load more quickly would also be nice.
Many thanks again.
michael.
I’ve had Verizon DSL for about a year and a half and have been quite pleased. I did the self install, but could not get a modem sync. After calling tech support, they scheduled someone to come out which was very prompt (within a day or two). Turns out that the hookup wasn’t done in the CO, plus my modem was bad. The tech took care of that and I was up and running.
I initially had some occasional problems, but Verizon’s tech support was generally pretty good about correcting the problem. Things are very stable now. There is rarely an area wide outage anymore and if there is one it seems to be for no more than a few hours. Very occasionally I have to turn my modem off (actually unplug, there’s no switch on it) and then turn it back on and sometimes must reboot as well. I’ve had no problems in a long time that required calling tech support.
I have the 768 / 128 kbps service and I generally get 500+ downloads. Actually, it has been 600+ recently. I also have done the dslreports tweaks. For a while I added the dial-up backup service ($7 / month for me) but I dropped that since the DSL service has been so reliable.
Just want to point out that the speeds you will see w/ apx 700 kb/s service is about 60 to 70 kb/s (due to bits and bytes). You will not see speeds at 80 or above and no where near 700 using ie or netscape. When you use dialup you will see speeds like 2-8kb/s these are the numbers you have to compare.
Also I frequently DL in the 60-70 kb/s range so i’m happy that I can almost max it out so consistantly.
pezpunk thanks I though they might try to up it after 1 year. I have had dsl for at least 2 years and possibally 3 - no commitment was required and I had to buy the modem outright. I am comming up on the time of year when I got the service, I really hope they don’t take away my dialup but it is in no way worth the monthly fee since I don’t use it often enough. I will most likely go with pay as you go internet.
One more question. I had an email from a friend here in Baltimore who has the Verizon package at $49.95 a month, but he adds:
In reply, i said to him:
So. what’s the deal here?
It is included in the cost however I believe that it is listed seperately. So in one spot the cost will be $29.95 + $20.00 GSP = $49.95. There are taxes on the network side of the price but they should be pretty small. I am not 100% on the breakdown because I don’t do billing but I am pretty sure.
Thanks pezpunk, that sets my mind at ease and confirms my decision to give it a go. Of course, if the service ends up being crap in any way, you can all be sure i’ll be back to complain on the SDMB. 
Thanks again.
No problem. Let me know how it works out. Good or bad.
mine with the $5 discount comes exactly to $34.95 per month on my bill - no extra fees/taxes. gsp charge of $5 /month is included in the charge and doesn’t appear on the bill.
Well, i hooked up my DSL today. It took about 20 minutes, and a minor glitch with regisration was quickly overcome by the very helpful Verizon person at the other end of the help-line.
The speed, while not quite as fast as the LAN system at my university, is unbelievable compared to my old dial-up modem, and is everything i could have wanted. So far, i’m very happy with the decision to give it a go.
Thanks for your advice, everyone.