DSL... Digital SPEEDY Line!
Written: Aug 06 '01
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Pros: Excellent reliability and predictable performance.
Cons: A bit pricey out here, initial provisioning botched.
The Bottom Line: I've had very good results with a GTE DSL local-loop and third-party ISP. I can't speak to GTE as an ISP, but their local-loop end works great.
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| dbirchall's Full Review: GTE DSL |
I've been a rather happy user of DSL for nearly two years now. When I signed up, the situation here in Hawaii was such that DSL required me to pay two companies - GTE (the phone company) for the local-loop connection to their central office, and a third-party ISP (in my case, Lava.net - I think I wrote an Epinion about them) for the connection from the central office through a frame-relay cloud to their facility, and from there out to the rest of the world.
This arrangement made things a bit expensive. GTE wanted $32.50 a month for 768kbps in and 128kbps out, and Lava.net wanted $55.00 a month for their part. Compared to the $45-50 most cable modem and DSL users elsewhere might pay, it was a bit steep. On the bright side, though, going through a third-party ISP meant I could get a larger block of addresses and generally more Internet-savvy people to talk to if there were any problems.
Not that there were many problems, of course. The technician showed up, installed a "splitter" on the line and replaced the phone jack by the computers with a dual one. Out of curiosity, he waited around to watch me boot up Linux, and I had everything working pretty quickly. It didn't really surprise me, as Linux is pretty networking-friendly.
Of course, once I witnessed the speed firsthand, there was no going back. We had a couple PCMCIA modems and an external - I think we sold one PCMCIA one, and we may have given the external one away. The connection is "always on" and so are the computers.
Things haven't always been perfect; there have been a few hiccups. Every now and then, a router at the ISP has to be taken offline for a few minutes for maintenance, or a change is made to the routing and someone forgets about our block of addresses. In general, though, any ISP-related problems are resolved within 15 minutes. After the merger that formed Verizon, the phone company did manage to knock us - and just about everyone else with DSL in the state! - off-line for several hours by screwing up a firmware upgrade to some equipment at their central offices. But we're still up 99.9% of the time.
In fact, service has been so reliable that took more than a year for me to realize GTE had accidentally set me up with 256kbps in and 64kbps out (what they used to call "bronze") instead of the 768kbps in and 128kbps out ("bronze plus") I'd ordered. The ISP folks were very helpful in getting things straightened out, and gave me a credit for the trouble.
In recent months, Verizon has finally gotten around to offering the complete, end-to-end DSL connection by themselves here, with no need for a third-party ISP. It's cheaper, but they don't offer the options I need in terms of address block size, address type, and things like that, so I'll be sticking with my current configuration for the future.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 87.50/month
Version Number or Year: GTE/Lava.Net, 1999-onward
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Epinions.com ID:
dbirchall
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Member: Dan Birchall
Location: Hilo, Hawaii
Reviews written: 262
Trusted by: 64 members
About Me:
Techie, writer, dad, outdoorsman, traveler.
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