The folks who I chat with on a regular basis have been wondering why they haven’t been seeing me online in the evening as much. My answer is three letters.

D. S. L.

That’s right, after years of living in various areas of Dallas but never being able to find that “sweet spot” where DSL was actually available, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon one of the areas that actually has the coveted Digital Subscriber Line available for use. Finally, I can no longer be denied. Instead of being relegated to only chatting or limited surfing thanks to a painfully slow dial-up connection, the majority of my online time is now dedicated to racking up kills in real-time with my favorite first-person shooters.

It all started after a recent move and a short phone conversation with an SBC representative to set up my local telephone service. Per the SBC sales script, she mentioned that they had a package deal that included my residential local phone service, internet access through SBC Yahoo DSL, cellular service with a Motorola cell phone with unlimited long distance -- all billed efficiently on my regular phone bill. After trying in vain for years to get high-speed internet access at various locations in Dallas, I had pretty much given up hope long ago. I signed up for the service without hesitation. Coincidentally, I received a bill from dial-up internet provider NetZero that exact same day. I blew my nose with it and laughed hysterically.

A few weeks after the call, my purple and blue box arrived from SBC Yahoo. Inside I found a sleek black SpeedStream DSL modem, four phone line filters, one wall jack filter, a modem cord, a data cable, and an installation CD and instructions.

Installation is simple for anyone with a basic working knowledge of computers. Simply slide the CD into the CD-ROM drive and the Macromedia Flash-based installation walk-through takes you step-by-step through the installation, complete with detailed illustrations. You’ll connect the high-speed modem to your computer, connect the modem to the wall jack, and flip the power switch. Then, the installation software installs all the necessary programs, including SBC Yahoo Connection Manager, EnterNet, and upgrades and adds a new skin to your Internet Explorer 6 browser. Due to some preexisting errors on my machine, I wasn’t able to upgrade to IE 6 and have the skin, but in a way it was a blessing in disguise. I know I would have been truly upset if I had started up Internet Explorer and found a useless, butt-ugly SBC Yahoo skin (which it is) and meaningless buttons cluttering up the interface.

Also included on the installation CD-ROM is a recent copy of ZoneAlarm to use as your firewall, provided you haven’t already bought a competing product like Norton Internet Security. Both programs worked well with my system, but my experience with Norton has been nothing but beautiful so far, so I stuck with that one. Still, reviews of the ZoneAlarm software are mostly positive, so users shouldn’t be afraid to give that one a try as well.

Once everything is installed and running, life with high speed internet access is just lovely. Just open up the Connection Manager and connect. The process takes only seconds, and when you see the two computers flashing on the right of your taskbar, you’re connected. For the most part, the connection is very stable – I’ve never had a connection dropped. Plus, according to dslreports.com, my connection speed is between ‘awesome’ and ‘insane’ with a download speed of roughly 1111/112 kbps as tested with a local speedtest server. Needless to say, downloads that took hours on 56k take seconds with DSL, and my triple digit Quake 3 Arena ping is down to low double digits. No more waiting five seconds after a frag to make sure I actually killed someone instead of unloading shells into an empty room thanks to lag.

Yahoo DSL tech support is reasonably sharp as well. I had a few minor setup problems thanks to my PC’s aforementioned preexisting condition, so I had to call tech support for some suggestions. The first rep was competent, amiable, and patient, which are three things that are difficult to find in many Help Desks, and after he realized I needed more help than his solutions could give him, I was escalated to another friendly level II tech after only about a ten-minute hold. Even though my problem couldn’t be solved, we did come up with a few good workarounds that work fine for me.

Despite all the positives, SBC Yahoo is far from a flawless product. One concern is the annoyingly glitchy connection software itself. When I first started getting online with SBC Yahoo, I started off connecting through their Connection Manager. Unfortunately, after a week or so, it just wouldn’t connect anymore. One hasty convo with tech support later, and they told me to create a shortcut directly to the EnterNet connection profile (apparently the Connection Manager is just some type of fancy shell), and that got me back on. Still, even this Enternet program occasionally does lock up when you first open it, or far more annoyingly, it often gives the illusion as though you’re online when you actually aren’t connected at all. Ending the task and re-starting usually eliminates both glitches, but I can imagine that this problem would be extremely frustrating for someone with just a basic understanding of computers.

Even though my experience with SBC Yahoo has been mostly pleasant, one of the things that truly sucks about DSL in general is that the quality of your experience will sometimes depend on your actual location. While I’m pleased with the connection and service and disappointed with the software, gracef, another D/FW resident, had an entirely different experience due in part to her distance from the call center. Still, if you do the legwork and find out that SBC Yahoo’s DSL service will be OK in your area, I do recommend giving them a try.


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 29.99