My area just came under the service umbrella for DSL. Finally! My little patch of silly con valley finally has broadband. (Wonder when I will get cell service?). Anyway, what is the recommended ISP? I looked at dslreports and Earthlink is the cheapest by far. I remember Tony loves Earthlink but I'm not exactly sure why. Also, I'm looking at DSL routers and in particular the SMC Barricade has my eye. Is there anything recommended in this hardware category that I don't know about? The barricade seems to have everything, multiple ports, printer server, serial port with dialup support, 10/100, wireless, etc.

Calvin

I have the 802.11b Barricade and is works great and is priced well. Go for it. I have Telocity (DirecTV DSL) as my provider and they are not so hot.

I got Earthlink right now Calvin and no complaints. The only bumps I hit was in the setup, but that was mainly pac bell's fault for not resetting the ip after my last tenant moved out of my place. He subscribed to earthlink and then cancelled before it got setup, creating a huge mess. But if you are starting fresh at your address, I see no problems in earthlink.

I have Telocity (DirecTV DSL) and they have their ups and downs (if you're at all interested in Usenet, don't go that route). If I had it to do all over again, I'd definitely think strongly about Speakeasy. Definitely geek-friendly, and you can get multiple static IP addresses, which is nice.

[personal bias]
Oh -- and don't go with Earthlink, unless you really want to give your money to the Co$.
[/personal bias]

I have the SMC Barricade, and I think it's a pretty good piece of equipment. Got it for $50. The print server is a nice feature.

The only complaint I have about it is that the software and firmware are still a little buggy. I have a cable modem and the barricade was having problems with freezing up when I had it setup for dynamic IP. So, I changed it to static IP since my IP barely every changes anyways. Haven't had a problem since.

You might want to check dslreports.com. They have forums for every major router manufacturer. You can see how the SMC firmware is coming along, plus see comments in the Linksys forum (or other router).

Is it true that you have to reboot the "gateway" aka DSL modem almost everyday? That seems to be a major complaint on dslreports.com, and that their billing department is screwy too.

I was considering going to them as I think my current provider is going to ditch the ISP aspect soon. They (jump.net) were bought out by hosting.com and they no longer sell new service, and I think it's a matter of time before they tell all the customers they are not going to provide ISP services anymore.
I'm going to go look into Speakeasy as Bitt mentioned. I need to have at least one static IP and no metered usage of my line.
I currently pay extra if I exceed 5G down/1G up per month.

Oh and I use the Linksys wireless router (model BEFW11S4), works fine for me.

Is it true that you have to reboot the "gateway" aka DSL modem almost everyday?

Well, you don't have to reboot the modem everyday but there are issues with it. Nearly everyday the modem goes into a sequence of losing sync and resyncing on and off for 30-45 minutes. Sometimes you can shorten this annoyance by rebooting the modem. Sometimes that doesn't work. In an average week I probably reboot that thing 4 times.

I used to have Flashcom with a lovely 3Com modem that worked like a dream. I still have the modem, but it is not compatible with Telocity/Verizon. Check out my review of Telocity on DSLReports:
http://www.dslreports.com/comment/822/22407

Is anyone here using Speakeasy?
I just spoke with a sales rep, and unfortunately to be able to even see if I can get the 1.5/384 speed, I need to cancel my current DSL with SouthwesternBell and jump.net. I have 384/128 becasue it was way cheaper at the time when DSL first reached my area in 1997. They said it could take up to two weeks to clear out the current connection (whatever that requires) just to be able to get Speakeasy/Covad to do a new install and then get me going. They say SWB doesn't make it easy to switch away from them (no surprise there!)
2 weeks downtime is really inconveinient when you use the DSL line ot host mailing lists and (really slow) websites....
I like the packages they offer and the price is the same for more options.

That reboot stuff is scaring me. I just came out from under a marathon debugging session. I installed the latest microsoft security fixes and drivers using windows update and now my computer blue screens upon boot half the time, crashes after a few minutes, etc. Really insane stuff. I uninstalled the security fixes and that doesn't do it. I uninstalled the drivers and it stopped bluescreening except when I run games. If I run games, it will blue screen. I finally traced it down to 3 completely independent causes that was somehow triggered by all this.

1) The drivers made some changes to *something* having to do with the video card that made it incompatible with AGP 4x .. i had to downgrade to 2x. :-(

2) the 4-in-1 drivers had to be upgraded. why it never crashed before i don't know.

3) the nvidia video drivers, the latest ones, have a tendency to infinite loop so I had to downgrade to an older variety.

(argh!!) as you can imagine, I had to work very quickly, as the computer left only a minute or two after booting up sometimes before blue screening. It took me dozens of tries before I had the video driver rolled back, the old one installed (thank god i had a copy lying on the hard drive, as downloading by 56k modem was not an option with 2 minutes of runtime). 4-in-1 drivers installed, etc..

The thought of reboots leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Calvin

Welcome to Windows. Where do you want to go today?

Where do you want to go today?

linux.org to DL linux?

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.)

IIRC, their web site says that if you can't get higher speeds, then they'll just charge you for the lower speeds. Call your sales rep back and see if they can confirm that. I've talked to folks over there before, and they've been consistently very nice and helpful.

When I was considering going to them once, I was thinking about getting them to install an SDSL line, which wouldn't interfere with the normal ADSL line. And then cancel my ADSL service after it got installed. It's pricier, but it might be worth it.

I was thinking about getting them to install an SDSL line, which wouldn't interfere with the normal ADSL line. And then cancel my ADSL service after it got installed. It's pricier, but it might be worth it.

The sales rep mentioned that, it is something I will consider, but yep, it's pricier. Though I do have plans for my website that would make SDSL more desirable. Making my own bass fishing videos to go on the Net for anyone who thinks watching fishing is exciting...
Only problem is 1.5 SDSL is $300 a month
Thanks for the link to Speakeasy, BTW, if you were a customer, I'd give you the referral...

I've got telocity/directv, and have had plenty of problems with them.

1) Our DSL modem got fried after having it for a month. I called them up to ask for a new one, and of course they insisted because it still worked but it caused our phone to not ring that it was a pac bell problem. No problem, they'll send someone out. They person arrived - yup, you've got a DSL modem problem. Call telocity back - "i've got a bad dsl modem"(me) - "no you don't, we'll send pac bell out again"(them). Well, after the third pac bell visit, a new jack run, and 3 weeks of not having a phone that rings, they sent us a new modem which amazinly enough solved the problem. Luckily enough I have understanding roomates who had no problem with leaving the dsl modem plugged in and not getting phone calls. If you can, get to "Tier 2" support. They're better. Not great, but better. A third teir of some sort exists, but they call you back. (I've got the phone number in my cell phone, should I need it again).

2) Their San Jose router has serious issues. It develops serious packet loss every few weeks. SSH sessions can be infuriatingly slow. These have gotten better recently, but it still happens occasionaly.

3) Reliability - They go down fairly freqently. Durring december it was once ever week, for 4 to 8 hours. Has only happened once since christmas, so I've got my fingers crossed

Our modem, once being replaced has been fairly reliable. It averages 1 month uptimes.

I've been spoiled. At home(I'm a college student) we have a local ISP (ultimanet.com) who I worked for for one summer, and they rock. I can count on one hand the number of times its gone down in three years, and I've never had the alcatel modem crash.