Hi-speed DSL

[jcarter]

That is a really interesting story!
We have Verizon DSL offered here, but I know one of the servicemen, and he said "Stick with your cable for the time being, as we are installing Fiber Optics around here and you will be offered it before long"  or something to that effect.
There is a huge underground vault(you could live in the thing)right up the street from us, and the guys are always working there and park their trucks on the edge of the woods near our house.  So when we am out walking, they show us what they are doing. I think they get bored and love to show off their technology to people.  And there are not very many people around here.
So I guess I will stick with Comcast, as this is the first week of their service here, they just bought out Adelphia.  Seems to work OK, and here are my speeds from Speakeasy this morning using New York, tis the closest one to us.
Download  3700 kbps   upload 352 kbps
Using Washington DC
Down  3734   up  351

 another test site from near Albany NY
download 3600  up 418

Thats not quite so helter skelter than it was yesterday, this is fun,
Jane

[RHPConsult]

Just a couple of final notes:

For Perfesser Moose:
Always endeavoring to tease the Gestalt from a mass of seemingly uncoordinated facts, I have now derived The Earthlink Konstant: Only 1 in 4 Earthlink Employees knows anything real/practical, but those who do will act upon it. That's actually the way it worked!

For Jane:
Fiber optics had nothing to do with my "solution". We have underground utilities in our village. Waiting through the on-hold morass and adhering to The Earthlink Konstant got me what they had earlier advertised, that's all. No new router, nor cables, nor OS, nor whatever was needed. Just someone in Tech Support 8000 miles away (with impecable American English, BTW) who knew how  remotely to adjust some electronics in a building 10 blocks from my house in <3 minutes and the deed was done.

The benediction:
6.0 MBps + IS better than 998 kbps

[Xairbusdriver]

Congrats for finally getting what you are paying for! My only shock is that you allowed the tech to make you call another number! Surely for these 'communications experts' they can make connections with any number on the planet from their own cubicle, especially for a paying customer! You have infinitely more patience than I.

[RHPConsult]

No shock, Jim. The "Supervisor" in fact was in a written exchange with me via their LiveChat function, while Ms. FixIt, to whom he referred me, was reached via a phone connection, in South Asia.

Even if he had been able to somehow do more than write down the number for me, I still think their execrable on-hold problem would have remained.

Since I recall only 2 ELN mail interruptions since I started with them in '98. I'm hoping that this new package will function as well and I won't have to avail myself of their TLC (Totally Ludricous Communication) in "Tech Support".

Fingers Crossed

If I had a "DayJob" I don't think I ever could have persisted. The genuine mystery to me is how performance is measured at Earthlink, with personnel and procedures seemingly designed to enrage the customers. That is the issue I will address with one Mr. Betty, ELN's president.

-  - -

To celebrate, I just placed an order for the new 24" iMac.  

Grandpa is "trickling-down" his Igloo. Makes the best excuse for a new Mac I've ever found!  

[jcarter]

Hi Dick,  I realize that fiber optics had nothing to do with your solution, but won't it be nice when we eventually get it in our neighbourhoods.  From what the techs told me, it looks like it will be all inclusive, TV, internet, and phone all in a bundle if we want it to be.  Our present landline is Verizon here and in Maine at our vacation house.
But the price of the fiber optics?  Who knows.

I do love your perseverance, you finally found someone with a functional brain stem at Earthlink!
Now you are running at wonderful speeds, I should look into DSL(I also have retained my old dialup Earthlink account, as when the cable goes on the fritz, I occasionally need it, and its my original capecod.net email which I dont want to give up.)  We have both Earthlink and Verizon DSL offers here, but Ive not really bothered to read the whole advertisements, I shall soon, as the speeds look delicious.
Thanks,
Jane

Oh, congrats on your new 24" iMac!  Tell me how you like it, perhaps its time for this Grandma to pass mine along to Grampa too.  My husband has an old iMac with os 9 on it.
Its time!!!!!

[Gregg]

Anything you don't have to work for is not worth the effort.

[RHPConsult]

QUOTE

I'm in my easy chair 50 ft. away from my router. I can gain a 30% increase in speed just by putting this iBook near the Netgear Router.

When I finally get caught-up on everything that's been on-hold (term used advisedly) for the past couple of weeks, I'll run some "field tests", SB.

 That's an interesting data point.

[Xairbusdriver]

Jane, not to put too fine a point on it, but there are only two types of 'accounts' at EarthLink/Mindspring/WhoeverElseTheyBought: dialup ( Nation-wide ) or DSL ( where available ). In either case, they are simply re-selling the lines from whomever they can buy them from.

When you sign up with them, you are buying an ISP. How you connect to them is your choice; you can access your account/mail/etc. via your cable connection, dialup, WiFi at the coffee shop, etc. As long as you pay, you have all the options they offer ( platform dependent, of course ), email ( with pretty good filtering ), web space ( limited to 10MB 'free' ), newsletters, etc. If you've not checked lately, you probably have a mailbox full of unanswered email ( most of it SPAM ). I don't know what their size limit is, but anyone using one of those addresses has long since been receiving those 'Over Quota' messages and wondering where you went.

So, there's no reason to 'save' it for when the cable 'goes on the fritz', you can easily use it with the cable. Or, perhaps, I'm simply miss reading your actions.

[jcarter]

Hi Jim,  I haven't gotten DSL yet, still with the cable company, now Comcast.
The main reason Ive stayed with Earthlink, is they bought capecod.net long ago, and thats my primary(and oldest)email address.
All that mail comes into my mac mailbox. I dont use the webmail option.
 Should I consider giving it up?  Only costs about $9 month. Now you've got me thinking about not needing it much any more, except for the email issue.  And the dial up, do I really need that any more either, cable is pretty reliable here.

The guys working on our street this morning said that the fiber optic was coming soon. They were all working in that underground vault thing again.  Its got huge fans in it, and you can hear them on a quiet night quite a distance.
Interesting,
Thanks for the advice,
jane

[RHPConsult]

Also, Jane, when you're away from your "home" cable, or cable generally, goes "Pffft", then you could have ELN "in reserve" on dial-up, so to speak.

Because I didn't want to change my longstanding Earthlink e-addresses when I could only get my first DSL from, then, PacBell in abput 1998, I simply adopted a low-budget/attenuated ($9) version of Earthlink for incoming mail and for all mail when away from home in dial-up land (in preference to WebMail).

Jane: You might find you could have fast cable (and/or DSL) for outgoing mail and surfng – from someone –, while maintaining ELN as your incoming "destination" It's worked for me.

Recently when Earthlink started offering its hi-speed DSL, and PacBell/ATT curiously asserted it wasn't available from them to me, I took ELN's offer. The rest is history . . . now happier than last week's version.

So we've undergone quite a transition. We now have two phone connections (VoIP), w/a whole range of bells and whistles, and the whizzbang DSL connection all from something other than the/a "phone company". I guess that means Modern Life has arrived at our door.

That's my story and you're stuck with it.

PS: DSL zooming along this a.m. @ 6.17 MBps.

[Xairbusdriver]

I don't use the web mail function either, except to see what the filters have caught and dumped into a 'holding' box for just one of my alias'. I set it to require my approval for anyone who uses that ( one, main ) address, so I check it daily to be sure I approve any late comers ( and they get added to my 'OK' list ).

If all your email is going to the .Mac account, you must have set up that forwarding address with EarthLink. That's fine, as long as you can access .Mac. I've not been impressed with thier reliability, personally ( I just left a query about not being able to download stuff from a 'Members Only' page even though I was plainly logged IN and my subscription runs through March of next year. ) I'm sure you could do that via dialup through EarthLink. But I like the filtering options at EL and reserve my .Mac accounts for more specific purposes.

It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. If your not using the EL accounts, there's not much use in paying $9 a month, if you still use those addresses, it's the only way to keep them. Value is in the eye of the beholder. I'm actually paying $17/month for about six different accounts/alias' there. Mainly because Judy doesn't want to change her main address for a National organization she belongs to. There is probably a much cheaper alternative - some kind of forwarding service that forces old addresses to go to a 'collector' site that then directs them to a user specified mail service. Sure sounds like a money maker, should it be possible...

[jcarter]

Thank you for explaining this, I guess I will stick with the EL for a while to save that email address.
Ive not used the .mac much, the email address sometimes, but I still have lots of picture albums there.  
We will see how Comcast does, if DSL is really about 4 times faster for cheaper, I might think about it, but its not really that important, if fiber optics is just around the corner,
Jane
I forgot to mention, that if we did go the Verizon route and get the fast DSL, we would have to install a Direct TV dish on our roof, and we would have to cut down some of our nice trees, or else stick the dish on one of our outbuildings way away from the house and run a cable underground.  My husband already has electrical cables buried on our property to our outbuildings, but we dont want to do to many more of those.
J