DSL provider recommendation

[David Wolfskill]

>Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 18:05:31 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Alvin Oga <alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com>

>if a business cannot afford to be offline during business
>hours, they should have at least 2 dsl lines just in case
>one dies in the middle of the day

Umm... that's going to depend a great deal on just what mode(s) of
failure you hope to protect against -- and odds are that each of the DSL
connections will have *both* ends in common:  one for the customer
premises; the other at the CO (note singular).

>outages and quality seem to vary depending on city/block location 

Certainly.

>users at home on dsl should have a backup dialup or dsl or cable
>( use 2 of the 3 .. not just one way to get to the world )

Both that, and the above "2 DSL" approach can make things enough more
complex that they really aren't feasible approaches.

FWIW, I had had intermittent, but fairly severe, problems with my
(home) DSL connection for several months... until a tech was sent out
who had just come from another Pac*Bell DSL customer in the area with
similar problems.  He was *finally* able to pursuade his colleagues at
the CO to investigate snfc21.pbi.net One More Time ... and viola! -- I
had no more recurrences of the mode of failure in question.

Unfortunately, I don't have valid statistics on this:  a couple of
weeks ago, my spouse noted a lack of connectivity (which I confirmed); I
checked the log being produced by a little Perl script that was supposed
to be monitoring the situation, and it gave no indication that there
was a problem.

Turned out that I had a nasty bug in the script; I made the cute
optimization that I had put in there about 1.5 years prior a non-default
option (thus the script was more accurate, at a cost of being more
invasive).

Last Monday evening, I had an opportunity to figure out what had gone
wrong, and fixed the script (so that the passive, non-invasive approach
worked).  I have no outages to report since Jul 21 21:01:41, when the
fixed version was implemented -- but that's less than 48 hours ago.

(The script is intended as part of a circumvention for the original
problems I was having with the line:  if it detects a lack of
connectivity, it tries various forms of evasive action, logging as it
does so, culminating with using some X10 (home automation) stuff to
power-cycle the Alcatel ADSL "MODEM" automatically.  I suppose that
merely the monitoring/reporting functions would be of some use to some
folks; I can put it up on www.catwhisker.org, if there's interest.  Fair
warning:  it is cobbled up assuming a FreeBSD environment; it parses and
uses output from "netstat" a fair amount, so to the extent that this
differs from FreeBSD's "netstat" in your environment, this could
be annoying to work with.)

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Based on what I have seen to date, the use of Microsoft products is not
consistent with reliability.  I recommend FreeBSD for reliable systems.