Ever since the hurricane, my phone and DSL lines have been flaky.

Surprisingly, the DSL has been more reliable than voice (as I type this, I have no dial tone (whooops...) take that back, I have dial tone with static, but I'm confident that based on tonight's experience, I will soon, once again, have no dial tone.

The internet comes on and off as well, sometimes with a bright red traffic signal on the DSL modem, and other times simply not working. Sometimes it comes back with no prompting, others I have to log into the router and manually reconnect.

This is all a long way of saying that life is frustrating as hell right now, and that if I'm not posting, you'll know why. Bellsouth guaranfrickingtees me that they'll have it fixed next Tuesday...

Rand

Get Wildblue Satellite internet. 1.5Mbps down and 256k up for $79.95 per month.

Dennis

I don't know if it's still this way, but dial tones used to be handled by recording. You pick up, and the phone company would send you the dial tone. They were limited in the number they could send out at any given time by resources, so if you picked up your phone, say, after an earthquake, when everyone else had just picked up their phone, you'd get no dial tone. Didn't mean you couldn't dial, just that they didn't have the dial tone available to tell you you were OK to dial.

Satellite connectivity blows, especially for on-line gaming. Eighty bucks a month is friggin' expensive for only 1.5mbps. On top of that, lots of wireless broadband providers, not saying that this one in particular does, have a download quota and once you exceed that quota your charged additional money per meg downloaded. I think I'm paying too much at $39.99 a month but I get around 2.5-3 Mbps down and 512Kbps up. I have a friend that just got the Verizon FIOS and pays the same I do for 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up. I’ll take the occasional landline infrastructure outage from a downed tree or ice storm versus the constant lag spikes and wonky performance.