First, I have one of the older Telocity gateways. Some people claim more trouble with them and other people claim less trouble. It's the only one I've ever had, so I can only tell you my personal experiences. I very occasionally have to reboot mine. Maybe once every two or three weeks at most. But when you do reboot, it takes maybe a minute or so to come back up completely. And since you get a static IP address with Telocity, it's not really that big a deal. If you had long-term TCP connections up (like an ssh client or a huge HTTP or FTP file transfer), it won't make any difference, unless your applications are awfully quick to timeout. Used to be that you could get your supposedly secret password to reboot the machine remotely, but they recently took that down, so you have to actually walk over to it and power-cycle. Too bad. I've still got my password, though.

Mine is actually not bad at all. I've been very happy with the service lately, except for the absolutely awful news servers they have. What makes it worse is that they used to have the best news server I've ever seen, but they decided that they didn't like supporting it or something, and they've limited binary downloads to 250MB a day, which is about enough to download the headers. If you manage to have some left over, the completion is poor enough that you'll have a hard time finding a complete group to download. And the text newsgroups aren't much better. My wife recently complained that alt.tv.smallville wasn't on there. I went to look and it's totally current over at Google.

And, better yet, there's almost no one to complain to. Their customer support is awful. It amounts to ``Try rebooting your gateway. Now reboot your computer.'' Honestly, if I'd had any major problems, I'd be jumping ship. But the bandwidth works just fine, and I seldom have any problems with the basic service, and when I do, they usually get solved before I even get to a support person on the phone.

Edit: Oddly, I just now had to reboot, about 5 minutes after posting this message. But it was back up 2 minutes later. (I don't think it was really a reboot issue, but it's worth it to try. It was probably a problem on their end, or BellSouth's, but, again, it was fixed juat a couple minutes later.)