Boston area: DSL provider recommendations, anyone?

[randomness]

Anyone in the area anyone really like? Work is willing to pay for broadband, although price is nevertheless a consideration.

Please email or comment if you have anyone you'd really like to recommend or really like to suggest I avoid.

Thanks!

Comments

[frotz.livejournal.com]

I like Worldband a whole lot. I helped someone else with phone wiring when they signed up with those folks, and they have very clueful techs, and the letter with the DSL model has a couple of paragraphs of "welcome to Worldband" boilerplate along with the essential IP parameters. Just my speed.

I have Verizon at home, their higher-speed residential service. It's very very drone-consumer-oriented (let me know if you want pointers on shortcutting all the crap without running their wretched install tools) and it's a dynamic address with PPPoE, but otherwise it's been quite reliable and it's cheap. I've seen brief drops a few times late at night when I think things were being reconfigured (none lately) and one major outage that they were very good at communicating about.

[starheptagon.livejournal.com]

Me too (funny that). Last year when my DSL modem died, they DROVE OUT with another one in person on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Do tell. Verizon's installer is famous for taking forever and doing crap like deleting all your
bookmarks during a lame brain damaged attempt to insert some.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

Speakeasy rocks but isn't very cheap.

Verizon is cheap and works, but probably contributes to being screwed longterm. (I suspect they are price dumping to get market share, I'm pretty sure they are among the scum trying this crap.)

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

They've already tried raising their rates after promising not to. They backed off when there
was enough public scandal and government inquiries started.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i went with speakeasy when i set things up here, mostly because i could get static ip's and they were relatively clueful. i've only had one or two actual outages and they're pretty good, in general. it looks like some of the upstream peering from speakeasy gets a little flakey. (i left pingplotter sessions running overnight to test and connectivity to one site was fine but another got twitchy around 0400. *shrug*)

[dirque.livejournal.com]

verizon dsl blocks port 80 and i think 25. dunno if you are running a server.

[hellpossum.livejournal.com]

AT&T found 101 ways to screw up and screw me when I had them as my ISP this summer. I unrecommend them. Some of that may be localized to the Connecticut area, as they seem pretty decentralized, but a lot of it felt systemic.