[PLUG] ATTBI to Comcast switch

[Derek Loree]

On Mon, 2003-06-09 at 14:30, Matt Chorman wrote:
> This CAN be true, but having worked at a company that had a "special"
> overpriced contract with Sprint for a couple of T-1s I can say that lots and
> lots of money doesn't always equal satisfaction either. I cannot count how
> many times the upstream DNS server would delete the reverse dns records. It
> was always an "oops!" situation involving the CEO's email getting rejected
> from a client that would alert us to this situation too!!!

I had even worse experience with a big national provider and a pair of
T-1's.  How about staying up all night (more than 4 hours - starting at
midnight), on hold to tech support (both T-1's were down), because they
had a glitch in their phone system that made everybody stick in the que,
no way out.  Or: deciding that the pair wasn't worth the money, placing
the order with explicit directions to call me before the change was
made, and coming in to work a week before the change was supposed to
happen to find two dead circuits (only took eight hours to get it back
up).  The really stupid part was that months later, the billing
department was still billing us for the pair!  Then there were the DNS
problems, man what a nightmare (I told the boss we should have run our
own DNS, but you know bosses)!

Compared to that, QWest is nice and friendly.
> 
> Pluses of DSL over cablemodem (in this area):
> *Future upgradeability
> *Not getting constant advertisements for services I will never use (i.e.
> television)

You forgot the biggest advantage - static IP addresses.  With DSL it is
trivial (either no charge or a little extra charge) to have a static IP
address, and a more can be had for a small fee.  This does depend on the
ISP, but you do have a choice.  Cable only allows dynamic addresses and
no choice of ISP's.

> Pluses of Cablemodem over DSL:
> *"Standard" Higher download bandwidth
> *Not getting constant advertisements for services I will never use (i.e.
> telephone)

I think Ken should expand on the security problems of cable, I haven't
read about any problems that a properly configured firewall couldn't
deal with, but then again I chose QWest instead of cable.:)

Good Luck,

Derek Loree