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It didn't take bankruptcy, or the looting of the company by its founders, to turn Adelphia into a world's worst service provider. This is a corporation that long thrived on treating its customers like garbage, with the knowledge that there were few other choices available for TV or high-speed Internet services. What killed them was the advent of competition, and I thank the heavens that DSL and DirecTV allowed me to say goodbye and FU to Adelphia years ago.
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DSL and pick someone who isn't up someone's ass like perhaps a Covad reseller.
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You would think DSL would be the perfect answer but DSL deployment is not always perfect either. 3 years ago I ordered DSL on top of an analog line in my new Brooklyn apartment. The end result was that the DSL people would make a change in the morning which would make my analog line inoperable and then I'd call and complain and the next morning the analog line people would make a change to fix that but it would kill my DSL. We did this for 10 days straight before I could get the analog line and DSL people to talk to each other and figure out what they were doing.
I might have a clue, though. In the picture above, I can see that Adam appears to be using a later version of my computer desk, purchased from lovely Ikea. Clearly there must be something about Ikea furniture that kills new connectivity.
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I've always loved the way cable companies do business. We've recently dealt with similar problems when Charter Communications purchased Astound here in Minnesota. Astound used to be a wonderful ISP that kept their network running 100%. Then Charter bought Astound and started routing through their screwed up network that goes down at least once every two weeks for at least 3 hours at a time with major network outages at their internal network.
They switched our business account over to an ordinary residential account and started filtering everything and blocking any packets that moved - but they were happy to continue charging us for our business line!
My business has switched away from Charter, but I'm still forced to use them for personal internet access. Why you ask? My apartment complex never installed a switching station (or routing box, someone correct me here) for the local TelCo to provide service. That's right, Charter is the only ISP that I can get.
Is there anyone else in a similar situation, where they can't even get DSL if they wanted to?
You'll all get little sympathy from me. My idyllic countryside home hasonly satellite for highspeed access. No cable and too far from aswitching station for DSL I have to go out and wipe off the snow duringstorms. Hey, it's better than the shitass dial up I was using less than12 months ago.
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In a TimeWarner test market like Austin TW rocks! In NYC TW does not. DSL actually has very low latency which for things like VOIP phone calls, quick respsone from websites, SSH sessions, etc. is more important than a massive pipe. Now if you're downloading the latest blockbuster... cable all the way!
three simple letters... D S and L.