My service so far has been great with an average consistent download speed of 1243 mbps in the speed test web sites. SBC also has a speed test site that you can also use. My test turns out to be slightly higher at SBC. Then of course my speed being that I'm only 7000 feet from the telephone company's central office. For people who happen to live farther from the central office, you may not get very good speed or speed consistency. After using broadband it's very hard to consider going back to dialup service especially how fast the web pages load with this DSL service. On dialup, my maximum sustaining download speed was 6 kB per second and on this service its 157 kB per second. When I did 2 different downloads at the same time to total was closer to 220 kbps combined. The most amazing thing about this service is how quick it downloads programs such as updates as compare with dialup take for example a 35 MB download used to take about one hour and 45 minutes can be downloaded with this service in about four minutes time. Another reason for me to switch to this service was because I have two computers and wanted to network them. And high-speed Internet service makes sense when you have a network. I went with a high-speed 802 G wireless router and a compatible PCI network card for my second computer which is a subject of a separate review which I will write soon.

Here are the negatives, do not install the program from the provided CD. And here are the reasons why, I initially installed some of the program from CD. From my experience it made the computer unstable and also slows the computer down somewhat. When the modem is on, it makes a high pitch whistle so I have to install it under my computer desk so the sound won't be so obtrusive. So I just simply uninstall every single bit of it. For me all I want was just Internet access and not the "junk ware". Since the supplied modem (Speedstream 5100B) can actually handled the authentication or login without the use of a computer and a way like a router would. Here is all which you need to do: type "http:192.168.0.1" on your browser to login to the modem. If it asked for a password, look underneath the modem for temporary password and type it in the window. When it opens, type in a temporary username at the login "sbcyahooreg@sbcglobal.net" with password "sbcyahooreg", then visit "support.sbcglobal.net/register http://support.sbcglobal.net/register" to set up a permanent user name and password. When you establish service with SBC and obtained your username and password. If would be a good idea to change the login password for the modem at this time for your security. You may also have to type in your username and password in the modem and then save and reboot the modem.

I will continually update this review as I learn more how this service turn out to be whether be positive or negative in the future.

Update June 22, 2005: our service was uneventful and has been very consistent and reliable with no outages so far. That noisy DSL modem was getting to me to a point that I didn't care much about the one year warranty. So I decided to modify it by taking it apart and rubber mount that large doughnut shaped coil by unsoldering that coil and soldering 2 small No# 26 AWG pigtail wires to reconnect. This modification appears very easy to do, since the connection only invoked two wires. That coil was remounted a little higher up at the same location on silicone rubber connecting through the two pigtail wires to the original connection on the circuit board. To avoid vibration transmission, the wires were bent to form a small loop. The coil is now floating on silicone rubber between the circuit board in this way so the coil vibration won't be transmitted to the circuit board which causes reverberation affect that amplify the high-pitched noise. I think that coil is part of the power supply filtering or maybe part of the switching power supply. After this modification, the modem was finally quiet.

(Update August 18, 2005, the new modem as supplied by SBC for anyone who signs up for the DSL service does not make that high-pitched noise anymore. It has the same user interface as the old one that can do PPPoE on the modem. So you don't have to run any PPPoE on your computer or router. It's the Efficient Speed Stream model number 4100 instead of the 5100 B. This modem is also smaller than the 5100 B so it takes up less desk space. Our service, three months down the line has been fairly reliable with a few disconnect and fairly consistent upload and download speeds. I think, the occasional disconnect is so that the IP address can be renew with a different one. Because this is a consumer grade residential Internet service with dynamic IP addressing. They do this to make it harder for people to run servers of any kind on this type of service. This happens to us in three or four days interval.

Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 19.95
Version Number or Year: 2005