Yep, that's about it.  You will be lucky to get a DSL at all because Bell South 
keeps the database of "availability".  Your chances of getting non Bell South 
DSL are vanishingly small.

The bad news is that Cox is the only other game in town and they offer little 
more than an expensive fast download.  They block ports and crimp upload to DSL 
speed and lower.  People have had trouble with packet losses and are unable to 
run various Microsoft networking packages.  SSH is reputed to work, though 
persistent connections may be impossible because Cox pushes new IP address 
every 8 to 24 hours.  Even the very expensive "Commercial" services come with 
port blocks for email and special arrangements must be made to use anything but 
Cox's smtp servers.  Cox's pop server is reported to not follow RFCs and this 
keeps some mail clients from working.  It's better than DSL for maintaining 
Debian, but I imagine Cox will figure a way to block that one day soon.  

Welcome to IT hell, Bryce.  You are in the grip of two mindless monopolies bent 
more on preventing services than providing them.  You might be better off with 
dial-up to your place of work and sneaker-net.  There are several people on 
this list working with ham radio and many with wireless dreams.  

On 2003.07.21 16:11 James Kuhns wrote:
> I'd recommend COX, I had a major issue with BellSouth (in Lafayette 
> area) which left a real bad taste in my mouth ... [typical anti-competitive 
> practice combined with incompetence matching my own experience with BellSouth]

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