[lug] Advice for a incoming Colorado newbie

[Michael Deck]

At 03:50 PM 1/5/2004, Nate Duehr wrote:
>On Monday 05 January 2004 01:37 pm, Paul E Condon wrote:
>
> > Don't take real estate peoples' word for broadband availability unless
> > person is clearly a geek. There are holes in the service areas.
>
>For DSL and Cable both, ask for the current phone number of the house when 
>you
>get to a point where you've found something interesting enough to pursue and
>then go put that phone number in the locators for both types of service and
>see if they think you have service at that location.

That's not an absolute guarantee, unfortunately. I've had both kinds of 
problem with this: the locator says service is available, guy comes to the 
site and finds no service; and locator says service is unavailable or costs 
lotsa extra bux, guy comes to the site and says no problem. The fine print 
on most of the locator pages is that they'll refund your money if it turns 
out you can't actually get service. For a while in my neighborhood, there 
wasn't actually enough copper to supply DSL or ISDN to everyone, even 
though the locator said service was available.

>I wholeheartedly recommend Front Range Internet (www.frii.net) if you go with
>DSL.  Extremely clueful admins, and they're the best ISP I've ever seen about
>outage notifications via e-mail... no other ISP I've ever had told me about
>every single little network problem like these guys do, and I like the
>transparency very much.

I agree. I had ISDN service through them. One thing to note with most of 
these guys is how the service term is structured. Earthlink and Comcast are 
set up so you contract for one year minimum and then after that you can 
cancel with some short-ish notice period (30 days usually). FRII's terms 
(at that time) were one year minimum and then automatic one-year renewal if 
_you_ don't remember and contact _them_. Not keeping close track of my 
contract expiration date, and not hearing from FRII before it, I was 
surprised when I went to cancel (to switch to SDSL which they didn't offer 
at the time) that I'd renewed for a whole year about 2 weeks before. They 
did release me from it, but they grumbled about it. Since then I've been 
more careful.


>--
>Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com
>
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Michael Deck
Cleanroom Software Engineering, Inc.