[lug] Followup experience with DSL at the Horizons

Harris, James A (Jim) HarriJA at LOUISVILLE.STORTEK.COM
Mon Apr 17 14:54:58 MDT 2000


Hiy all!

I thought some of you might be vaguely interested in this loooong time
running topic of DSL in Superior, specifically at the Horizons.  A while ago
it was announced that Flexcomm was going to be offering up to 1Mb/s DSL at
the Horizons.  Well, after some waiting and a couple of "hey, how's it going
phone calls", it was installed Saturday.

Here's my experience (I have to promote something that went well...)

VERY very pleasurable experience.  They apparently ran into some snags with
Level III and the WAN links, but when I called this last time they scheduled
to have someone out in a week.  They did the install on Saturday, which I
thought was very cool.  The tech. was very laid back and totally cool with
letting me do all of the work on my server.  He ran the DSL through the
third pair in the wall since it was available and they've been having better
luck with a dry pair. 

They're using Tut SDSL modems and if you pay them via credit card, they give
the modem to your for the duration of your service for no additional charge.
They came prepared with a static IP, our user IDs and the necessary hardware
and had it up and running in about 30min.  I had most everything else and
was ready when they came, so the tech hung around to verify that everything
looked good.  He was actually very interested in Linux and I showed him some
of the cool monitoring tools GKrellM, Ethereal and a few other little
monitors I found that do a nice job with network interfaces.  Their policy
for letting us geeks do our funky things is very laid back and can be
summarized simply:  "Just don't flood our network with bad packets or take
over any of our servers and we're happy..."

The service itself rules.  There don't appear to be many other people on the
subnet yet, so we'll see how it holds up in the long run, but so far, so
good.  We're getting excellent throughput with no hiccups or otherwise
annoying problems.  Our ping is hanging pretty steadily at about 60ms, even
when my roommate and I are pounding the line to death.

Anyway, just thought I'd let anyone know that's trying to get this service
in the area.  So far it's been a great experience.  (I would recommend
calling and scheduling with them even though they said they'd call.  They
appear to be playing catch-up and those who are calling for status appear to
be getting bumped to the top of the list.)

James Harris
EDS Helpdesk Systems Analyst
EDS @ StorageTek
Phone:  303.661.8763
harrija at louisville.stortek.com
---
"How delightful, it's as if someone stabbed Mr. Bubbles!" - Stewie, Fox TV's
Family Guy





More information about the LUG mailing list