[olug] best broadband option?

[neal rauhauser]

  The only ISP that doesn't suck is the one you own, and that still
mostly sucks. This being said ...


   Cox provides cable modems. They're nearly everywhere and the speed is
good. They offset this goodness by having a contest at HQ in Atlanta for
who can come up with the stupidest modification to the AUP and they seem
to be giving prizes for this on a quarterly basis when they roll out the
changes.

  Qwest, hereafter referred to as QPest, owns all of the copper in
Omaha. They have a DSL plant and so does Alltell, a ma & pa CLEC from
just down the road. QPest is an ILEC - supposedly this stands for
Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier - but I thought for years the I was for
Incompetent. I used to think the C in CLEC meant Competent, but the way
Alltel is acting lately I've promoted them to Clueless.

  Any ISP can order an ATM circuit from QPest or smAlltel and start
offering frame relay and DSL. I do mean *ANY* ISP. You can get a Cox
busines cable modem, buy a Cisco MC3810 off Ebay, and if you can front
the $450/mo for the ATM line *POOF* you're an ISP. If you don't get
service from Alltel or QPest you can bet you're getting aggregated 456:1
or something like that, and that you're fighting with 5267 colocation
customers for bandwidth, and its all fed with one scraggly third tier
provider T1 ... generally from some real lemurs like MCI or LightHouse,
hereafter referred to as BlightHouse.

   There are rumors of some evil, twisted thing that hides from the
light in the western suburbs of Omaha. Telechoice, they call it.
Teletroll fits it just as well in my opinion - double nat'd this, triple
nat'd that, its all just far too autoerotic to be taken seriously.

  Some poor fools with more money than brains try to provide internet
service via microwave links, generally in the ISM band - the very same
band that your microwave oven uses to heat things. I think most all of
the principles of these companies have spent too much time standing in
front of illegally amplified sector antennas and their wetware has been
heated outside of milspec operating temperature.

  
  As you move up the foodchain, bandwidth wise, you get to the point of
buying a T1. The credulous have LightHouse or MCI, the political get
saddled with Genuity, control freaks buy AT&T, and real men, of which
there are less than a dozen in Omaha, use some mix of the two clueful
tier ones - Sprint & UUNet.


  So that is the whole story on bandwidth in Omaha. Grim, isn't it? Grow
large enough to pay for carrier grade bandwidth if you need it, get real
lucky like I did and slop into a location with multimegabit carrier
service that basically stands idle, or simmer with the masses in a low
quality swamp filled with AUP alligators :-(












"Larson, Timothy E." wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the tips and opinions.
> 
> So far I've discovered that Qwest doesn't offer DSL at my new address, and Cox doesn't have an 800 number.
> Are there any other broadband providers?
> Is Cox DSL or cable?
> 
> Sounds like I'll have to either pay a lot or jump through hoops to run a server from home.  :P
> Well it was a nice thought while it lasted.
> I don't suppose there's a OLUG colo co-op?  :)
> 
> Since I'm no longer just lurking, here's a little more about me, by way of introduction.
> I'm a programmer, and have done primarily web apps for 5 years.
> (C, C++, Perl, Java, and the occasional ASP.)
> My areas of geekdom are Macs, web, and databases - I aspire to greater *nix geekiness.  :)
> At home I run MacOS, Linux, and NetBSD - all on Mac hardware.
> My wife runs Win98, but I'm going to convert her to Mandrake, though I'll probably have to remind her that it WAS her idea.
> On religious issues:  bash, vi, Blackbox.  :D
> I'm becoming convinced that the Nebraska heat is going to melt this Minnesota boy.
> 
> I still feel I'm relatively new to the LUG scene, but I guess I've been involved with K-LUG here in Rochester for close to two years.
> Looking forward to meeting some of you in the near future.
> My address will be changing in a couple weeks, but I'll be around.
> 
> Tim
> 
> --
> Tim Larson     <><   <><   <><   <><   <><     OL 4-131-2
> Info. Services - Int. Med. Clin. Systems, Mayo Clinic, Rochester
> The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. - John F. Kennedy
> I apologize for the irregular wrapping and quoting.  I use MS Outlook.
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