[joe_faber]

Anybody use Earthlink's DSL? I'm thinking about getting it for my brand-spankin' new - okay, maybe slightly used - G4/450. I'm not too worried about Earthlink going out of business, and they say it's available in the NY metropolitan area. Would *really* appreciate hearing from folks who have used either Earthlink or Verizon DSL.

Thanks!!

j

[yoyo52]

This probably won't apply to you because you don't have to worry about being disconnected from a third party DSL connection. In my case, I can tell you that I had DSL via Telocity, cancelled it because I thought the service was shoddy, and then tried to connect via Earthlink. That's where the fun started. Earthlink has to depend on Verizon to do the actual wire connection. Verizon had to depend on Telocity to tell it to disconnect the Telocity service. Telocity said that it had ordered the disconnect. Verizon said it never received the order. Earthlink said it couldn't do anything until Verizon notified it. After two months of waiting (with lots of phonecalls to all three groups) Earthlink up and cancelled the order. The only notification I got was from going to the order-processing web page and seeing that it had been cancelled. Now I'm waiting for Verizon to connect me.

I hate to have to work through Verizon, to thell you the truth. I think their behavior is monopolistic and exclusionary. But given the way that the whole industry is set up, I'm afraid having an account with an ISP rather than with the owner of the wires is probably not a good idea.

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And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear

[cube-dude]

Transfering to the Lounge

[gorgonzola]

I have ELN/DSL. Works for me. Get consistent 60K/s transfer, on slow times and fast servers I've gotten 100K/s before. Service is very consistent. They had their first NYC outage this weekend and had it fixed within a few hours. Annoying but they worked as fast as they could.

6 months it's been working great. Their support is free/24/7/smart, which is the best combination. It's pretty cheap. $40/month for dynamic, $65/month for static IP.

And it works great with Mac OS X.

I'll give them my thumbs up. Go for it.

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

[osiris]

Me too - but more between 50K/s with peaks of 80.
and only three days downtime the past year.
I'm pretty satisified, and the service is good.

The only thing I can suggest is a MacSense Xsense router to avoid
Earthlink's MacPoET client (the software used to connect to your ISP)
I've had problems with it - it seemed to slow my G4 400 down to a crawl and was kind of buggy for me...

but it doesn't matter now - OS X can handle PPPoE natively and it'll be easier to set-up and use.

I say go for it too!

[pathogen]

man, in Canada I have a dynamic IP DSL for $39.95 a month (in Canadian dollars) and have seen my downloads hit 225k/s...

Why is it so expensive in the U.S.?

$40 US = $62 Can
$39.95 Can = $26 US



[This message has been edited by pathogen (edited 05-21-2001).]

[davidflas]

Let me make one thing very clear: Verizon=evil. Out here in the wilds of the midwest I have Verizon as my local phone company. My mother lives 8 miles away and its a long distance call because she has Southwestern Bell phone service, how stupid!

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Jesus chills with a 40

[Eugene]

I really detest PPPoE.

I was lucky. When I signed up for PacBell Fastrak DSL in 1999, even the basic package gave you a static IP. I never had to switch to PPPoE...I was grandfathered. I get 150 k/s from my Berkeley apartment. My ping from my UC Berkeley computer lab to my computer behind the DSL is usually ~40-50 ms.

However, cable in Berkeley is another story. Unless you are lucky and your tap isn't being shared by many people, you'll get bad download speeds during the day. My friend says he averages about 50 k/s during the day and 200+ at night. HIs pings are often nearly 1 whole second.

Over the summer, I'm staying at my parents'. We tried to order the enhanced DSL package which gives you 5 static IPs, but after 2 visits and 2 line-tests, it was determined that DSL would not be an immediate option for our house.

I looked into Sprint Broadband, which is a radio/wireless ISP. It looked promising, but I didn't want to be a pioneer, so I passed that option.

So we ordered cable instead. It took 5 visits to get it all working.

Visit #1 - Installer comes out and reports that he will not be able to install. He only had 150 feet of cable and the conduit from my house to the street was more like 200 feet. He also said my house needed RG-11 cable for a better signal.

Visit #2 - A day later, the construction people for AT&T@Home come and try to thread the line through the conduit. They find out the conduit ends right under a tree and they say they need to come back and reroute the cable around the tree.

Visit #3 - They come back the next day and install the line from the street to my house. I reschedule the install.

Visit #4 - A rather nice fellow comes to install the cable modem and everything. He connects the internal wiring from my study to my AV room, where all the coaxial cable lines from other rooms end up centrally. He connects that line to a line that goes to my phone closet. He goes to the phone closet and discovers RG-11 cable going to the street. He can't attach the fittings to the RG-11 because he doesn't have the right tools. He calls another guy to come up an finish it.

Visit #5 - The tech comes and finishes the install.

Now for performance. I get pings under <20 ms to the same computer lab in Berkeley, and I'm across the bay at this point. Sometimes pings go down to ~5 ms. I get an average of 400 k/s download speed. I'm the ONLY customer on my tap, and Iive in a sparsely populated node.

For this location, cable was better than DSL.

I know a few people in NY who use Optimum Online Cable. They're very happy with their service. You might want to consider them.

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Eugene Chan
[email protected]
http://www.eugenechan.com/

[VRL]

Oh how I wish I could get in on the DSL fun in the U.S. At least you all have a choice! Unless I missed something, the only choice I have at my location is the T-online (dedicated to using Winblows) ISP with bad service. How I wish someone could recommend a better ISP (DSL or whatever) here in Germany.

(Sorry for the off-topic rants. Getting disconnected twenty times a day tends to annoy me.)

[itai195]

I used a cable connection in Berkeley and it was terrible actually, I would've been happy getting 50k during the day but it was more like 2k!

Anyway, I've got earthlink DSL and it works like a charm, much more reliable than my cable was. I can't really comment on the quality of their support though, since I haven't called them at all. Also, try to get something to avoid having to use MacPoet, it's really terrible... If you have OS X this isn't a problem since PPPoE is built in.

[PeteWK]

I've had Earthlink DSL for about 6 months now and it works like a charm. I've had a couple of out days due to power outages and the like buy nothing that would cause my blood pressure to get too high. During off hours, I've been getting as high as 1.5 million (T1 speed) but usually 1.0 million. I've never gotten less than 300,000. 40 dollars well spent, if you ask me.

PeteWK

[joe_faber]

I'm confused... Why would I need a router? And how would getting a router allow me to avoid using the Earthlink client software? (I'm planning to stick with MacOS 9 as my primary OS until I can use MS Explorer, Entourage, and a few good games natively...)

Thanks!!

j

Originally posted by osiris:
Me too - but more between 50K/s with peaks of 80.
and only three days downtime the past year.
I'm pretty satisified, and the service is good.

The only thing I can suggest is a MacSense Xsense router to avoid
Earthlink's MacPoET client (the software used to connect to your ISP)
I've had problems with it - it seemed to slow my G4 400 down to a crawl and was kind of buggy for me...

but it doesn't matter now - OS X can handle PPPoE natively and it'll be easier to set-up and use.

I say go for it too!

[Arty50]

I have Earthlink DSL and a Netgear RT314 router. DSL/Cable Routers are great because they have built-in PPoE software. The Mac PPoE clients (I haven't used OSX's cause I've had my router longer than that) are awful. They don't have an option to automatically log in, and their connections are anything but stable. When you get disconnected from the network you have to reboot. The same happens with connections that use DHCP in OS 9. I've had Cable and DSL and if you get disconnected with either it's a pain. If you have a router handling your connection and the connection expires, it automatically reconnects for you. And you don't have to reboot because as far as your Mac is concerned, your IP never changes. They're very nice, and I would recommend one to anyone that has broadband access.

Also, a little piece of advice. My installation tech was really cool. If you get the Efficient Networks Speedstream DSL modem be sure to stand it upright on it's side. He told me that every single modem he's ever had to take in was kept flat by the user, and that it's a prominent problem. He's never had a problem with modems that were stood on their side. Looking at the placement of the vents on the modem, it's my guess that it's a heat issue.

[hmurchison2001]

Earthlink sucks. My ISP Speakeasy.net rocks. I can run my own servers and get up to 10 Static IP's per account. Beat that!

[itai195]

Originally posted by joe_faber:
I'm confused... Why would I need a router? And how would getting a router allow me to avoid using the Earthlink client software?

You wouldn't have to get a router, but I'd suggest it. You have to use PPPoE client programs such as MacPoet in order to log into earthlink's service whenever you want to use your DSL connection. Routers such as the ones Linksys and Netgear offer have PPPoE capabilities built in. Basically they will log into earthlink for you so that you don't have to use the client programs like MacPoet. Routers are a luxury but make your connection much more useable because, basically, MacPoet is a very crappy program that I'd recommend avoiding if possible.

[jeffnudi]

I have had Earthlink DSL since last August. I have been very happy with the performance, and have not had to contact tech services since the original installation. They provided a SpeedStream modem, and EnterNet software. I have a G4 400 Sawtooth, running 9.1. I am very satisfied.

[macbeaker]

I have Earthlink DSL and it's been excellent, except for one recent issue which I solved by using a router to connect to the DSL modem. Apparently Earthlink uses your computer's Ethernet MAC (not Mac) address to authenticate that you are who you say you are when you connect to the ISP. This doesn't really matter unless you try to connect to Earthlink through a different computer (which has a different MAC address), which then becomes an unasked-for lesson in patience (or anger management ). Anyway, a lot of routers will allow you to clone a computer's MAC address, which alleviates the problem. A router, as others have mentioned, will allow a true always-on connection which is usually much more stable than a software connection allows. Something to consider if you ever want to upgrade your computer...

[bluehz]

A router is definitely the way to go. I have a LinkSys on Earthlink DSL and the LnkSys stays connected all the time. So it is effectively an "always on" connection. Without the router you have to go through the 'dialup' so to speak - much like using a modem only it is PPPoE software.

[theUpsetter]

I have earthlink DSL in the Bay Area, and it's great. They installed with no problem on the first day, less than 3 weeks after our inital call. The speed is great, I've seen DL speed as fast as 800 k/s and this is only for 39.99 a month. Customer service from earthlink sucks though, so beware.

BTW..I've had a netgear router from the start, but i had to use macpoet once to trouble shoot our line (Phone company problem, not earthlink) and it sucked. Routers can be had for 150 or less, go for it.

Brandon

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

I have Earthlick DSoLw in the LA area. I'd hate it if I had to use it with that crap MacPoopET software... but with a Linksux Router it's decent enuff.

40 smakkers a month, free installation by a certified goon, don't need any tech support, 60-80K/s neighborhood.

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Badda bing!

[RoofusPennymore]

At least you can get DSL. NM has only had high speed anything for about 2 years, and I can't get anything where I'm at.