DSL provider recommendation

[Brent Chapman]

At 6:05 PM -0700 7/23/03, Alvin Oga wrote:
>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

If a business cannot afford to be offline during business hours, they 
shouldn't be on a DSL connection.

Many of the more common DSL failure modes will take out all the lines 
in a neighborhood: a cable cut, a DSLAM failure at the CO, or a 
failure of the T3 between the DSLAM and the carrier's hub, for 
example (there are many more examples).

One of the reasons that DSL is relatively cheap is that it doesn't 
have all the redundancy and service level agreements and such that 
you get with traditional high-speed data lines (T1, etc.).  You get 
what you pay for.

I was Covad's original network architect, so I'm pretty familiar with 
the various failure modes...

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

Yes, for a whole bunch of reasons.  Quality of the telco 
infrastructure in that area, cluefulness/cluelessness of the local 
telco personnel in that area, the vagaries of a particular piece of 
equipment (a flaky DSLAM in the CO, for example), etc.

>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 )

At home, and currently for my consulting business, I use DSL as my 
primary connection with a dialup backup.  As I bring the consulting 
business back online, I'm considering moving my web presence off to 
my ISP's (SpeakEasy, by the way, who I highly recommend) hosting 
farm, to improve reliability over the do-it-yourself system I've got 
now (a Linux box at the end of my DSL line).  I'll probably host my 
top-level pages (which are mostly static) at SpeakEasy, and my 
various mailing list archives and such (which are mostly dynamic) on 
my own host, so that I have total software control over them.

-Brent
-- 
Brent Chapman <Brent at GreatCircle.COM>
Great Circle Associates, Inc. -- Silicon Valley's IT Infrastructure Experts
http://www.greatcircle.com/
+1 650 962 0841