Go to http://www.adcritic.com and search for Pacific DSL. This company is trying to sell DSL by displaying the ‘downside’ of cable.
Regardless of the truth these are some of the funniest commercials I’ve ever seen (really…they’re hilarious).
You need Quicktime to view the commercials. Also, lately, I’ve had trouble getting anything from adcritic to work well.
Still, if you can view these commercials they are well worth the effort.
Yeah, I live in a Pacific Bell service area (Pasadena CA), and so I get to see all those commercials all the time. They are indeed inspired!
And although my ISP is Earthlink, it’s actually PacBell that provides my hardware and it’s their host that is the first one down the wire from my Mac, and it’s just two blocks away. My speeds are great, but my friend across town had to cancel his PacBell DSL and go cable to get anything faster than 128k.
I’ve had mine for about 10 months now, and it works fabulously.
But…
It was a royal NIGHTMARE getting the DSL installed. When the “self-install” subscription offer arrived in the mail, I thought it would be easier than trying to arrange for a tech to come install it for me. I didn’t want nor need some stranger digging around in my computer…
At first I was told “three weeks” for Earthlink to get the wires arranged and the accounting lined up. In the meantime, PacBell was supposed to send me my hardware via UPS. Three weeks came and went, and no hardware…
After six weeks, Earthlink was calling ME to see if I had gotten the hardware yet because PacBell was billing them yet I hadn’t ever logged on.
To make a long story short - I badgered Earthlink (the only customer support avenue) for two more weeks until they gave me one of their modems, and a promise to forward my PacBell hardware back to them once it arrived.
It never did. It will be a year this June since I first placed the DSL order.
And to top it all off, the CD-ROM that Earthlink sent me arrived in a damaged envelope - one that had opened to conveniently display my username and password, which should NEVER have been printed out anyway, much less carelessly exposed for everyone to see. And add to that the fact that the CD-ROM was an outdated version, no longer compatible with their network!
The Broadband Division of Earthlink was certainly not operating up to the same standards of excellence I was used to encountering with the dialup service.
Anyway, once it was all installed and set up, it worked fabulously. I frequently get peak transfer rates of 1.5Mbps down, although upload peaks at about 200kbps and I seem to have some problems with FTP. Downtime started at about 3 to 5 days a month but has been less than one day a month as far as I can tell for the past few months. I get pings from a friend’s T1 hosts up the road as fast as 21ms, so my little pipe is not far from the big honkin’ pipes out there.
Overall it’s great service, but getting it installed was almost not worth it. The only reason I persisted is because I refuse to patronize a cable company for any service (a long story).