On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, The Hoelschers wrote:

> Well, I finally took the plunge and bought DSL.  Went with Telocity
> since they don't require a year-long contract.  So far, I'm mildly
> dissapointed.  The service has been solid, no complaints there, but
> while I have "up to 1.5 M" service, I have never budged from 393, 048
> BITS per second.  Something less than "screaming", wouldn't you say?

Yep. But what sites are you hitting? Try some place with big fat pipes
going out... openoffice.org is a good one. So is kernel.org. See what
kinds of times you get out of those. Just remember that you need to do
this during off-peak hours. Even during busy times I usually average
75kbyte/sec downloads from them.

> I find myself wondering if Southwester Bell has any means of
> manipulating the service in order to drive business to themselves
> directly as opposed to using the VAR's (yeah, call me a conspiracy
> theorist!)

If SWB stooped to doing this I would be surprised. I have not seen it
going on with my SDSL lines through another provider.

> My main question is about Sprint ION.  According to their web page, it
> only works with Windows and Mac.  Does anyone know if this is a "real"
> restriction (i.e.: it won't work without the PC side software) or is it
> just that Sprint has not seen the market for Unix/Linux based installs,
> so they have not explored it yet?  (This was another reason I went
> with Telocity - they weren't afraid of big, bad, Linux users!)

ION is also $150+ a month.

-- 

Randy Rathbun                            randy@randyrathbun.org
http://astrodot.org - 100% Amateur Astronomy. No preservatives.
http://randyrathbun.org          http://quitequitefantastic.org

"I've known and respected your husband for many years, and what's good
enough for him is good enough for me."
 ~ Groucho Marx