[email protected] wrote: > Does anyone have any recommendations for a good DSL provider in Boston?
Are you literally looking for a DSL provider, or did you mean an Internet provider? I believe MegaPath (formerly Covad) still sells DSL to new customers in the Boston area. BLU's Discuss list (http://www.blu.org/) is a better list to ask about this. The topic comes up there periodically, and you can probably find a bunch of threads in the archives: DSL: http://search.gmane.org/?query=dsl&group=gmane.org.user-groups.linux.boston.discuss FIOS: http://search.gmane.org/?query=fios&group=gmane.org.user-groups.linux.boston.discuss Comcast: http://search.gmane.org/?query=comcast&group=gmane.org.user-groups.linux.boston.discuss srevilak wrote: > I spent a week trying to get Verizon to look at the downed cable... > I called Comcast about the downed wire...and they fixed it the next day. > > In my book, Verizon is pretty terrible. > Comcast, on the other hand, seems like a better company. The quality of the customer service at these big consumer companies operating in monopoly or near monopoly markets probably ebbs and flows over the years, but usually they earn the bad reputations they have. Similar to your experience, a colleague moved recently and was looking forward to getting FIOS at the new location. He called Verizon to schedule the install. They didn't give him an ETA. Days went by, and still they couldn't tell him when the install would happen. (It seems there was confusion on Verizon's part as to whether the apartment was wired for FIOS already.) In contrast, he called Comcast, they confirmed the apartment was wired for it, and a day layer had network service working. On the other hand, I've been a long time Comcast customer for video service, and I resent that I need to call in yearly to renegotiate my bill in order to get a sane rate. (If you're not currently paying a promotional rate for cable TV, you're likely paying way more than you could be.) But Comcast isn't alone in jacking up prices and adopting limited time promotional rates, they're just a happy participant in this ugly approach. They seem to be trying to price their product to encourage cord cutting. At least until you notice the high prices and threaten to cancel. Then they practically give it away so they don't have to show declining video subscriber numbers to their shareholders. (This is why you can often get Internet + video for less than Internet only.) You can usually get a better customer service experience from these companies by paying a bit of a premium for business class service. It'll also lets you bypass stupid restrictions, like port blocking, data caps, and policies that prohibit servers. My understanding is that Verizon has a superior last mile architecture, yet Comcast's engineering group seems to put them among the most advanced ISPs, with early adoption of DNSSEC and IPv6. (If Comcast upgraded to dedicated fiber loops to the premise, and ran their customer service and policy side of their business the way they run engineering, they'd be a potentially terrific ISP.) -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
