Internet service alternatives

[i]

I think I'm at the point where standard DSL and cable internet service is just too limiting. I'd like something closer to "real" internet access -- no download/upload caps, no port blocking, and a real world-facing IP address (something I don't have now with this crazy service).

A T1 is way out of my price range, but I'm considering an SDSL connection, at either 384kbps or 768kbps. I've been looking at Speakeasy's service, and I'm really tempted. Their prices run at $120/month for 384, and $160/month for 768. (At $525, the hardware and installation charges are a little painful.) Does anyone have some experience with non-mass-market internet service in their home? How well has it worked out? Was it worth the switch?

Alternatively, am I crazy?

 

[time]

Trailblazers are always crazy.

I take it you're currently on cable? Would dynamic DNS help your cause?

 

[i]

Good thought, but no. I'm actually on a private network (10.x.x.x) shared between a number of large residential buildings.

 

[i]

Well, call me crazy.

I've decided to go with Speakeasy's 768Kbps SDSL package, probably with their VoIP service just to give it a try. Unfortunately, the rep I'm apparently supposed to deal with (that part is irritating -- I guess the sales staff are on commission) is on vacation until next week. So I won't be getting the ball rolling until next Monday at the earliest.

I'm hoping to ditch my current phone company, my current ISP, and my current web-hosting company all in one shot. I'm going to try hosting everything I need in my kitchen. (Where else would I?!)

This will be an interesting adventure. I imagine I will have lots of strange networking questions in the coming weeks. :elephant:

 

[Pradeep]

I'm assuming you aren't in an area covered by Verizon FIOS?

 

[i]

Being in the downtown core of a large city, I might easily be. But without even checking, I'll guess that Verizon would:

a) be overpriced, and
b) cap bandwidth usage, and
c) ooze with fascist restrictions as to what kind of things I can do with the service I'm paying for (e.g. no servers), and
d) provide absolutely no SLA, and
d) not provide any symmetric options.

 

[i]

(And yes, I do use a unique English-based alphabet with 27 letters. :wink: )

Basically I want something closer to real Internet access. Something like what I used to have back in university: a real IP address, reliable connectivity and transfer rates in both directions, and no stupid limitations as to what I can do with the service I'm paying for beyond a sensible AUP.

 

[Mercutio]

Er... Verizon FIOS is 30Mb/s service. Would you really worry about bandwidth?!?

Also, Verizon is one of the "good guys" WRT to permissive TOS. Verizon let me run an SMTP and IMAP server on my DSL connection, and AFAIK it is the only major high-speed ISP that does not cooperate with RIAA or the MPAA to nab filesharers..

 

[i]

From the Fios FAQ:

The consumer offers do not permit customers to host any type of server, personal or commercial.

In other words, it's just like AOL, only faster. Woohoo.

You know how you feel about Western Digital? That's how I feel about Verizon.

 

[freeborn]

You may check if there are any fixed wireless companies in your area. I use www.mesanetworks.net for my home service. Their residential premiere service is $58 US a month giving me 2.5mbps down and 1mbps up with a static IP, 10 pop mail accounts, and 10MB of web hosting (if I'm ever ambitious enough to figure out how to use it).
My latency is great (30ms to Denver) so gaming is not a problem.
Free

 

[i]

Ugh. They have a business version.

Mercutio, I actually feel the same way as you do about Western Digital. However, that has not stopped me from being tempted by ridiculously large, on sale, WD hard disks. I'm happy to say I've never given in to that temptation, but there it is.

And now, here I am looking at Verizon's business Fios service. :-?

Thanks for the link freeborn. I'm not sure how well wireless would work where I am ... lots of tall buildings in the immediate vicinity.

 

[Mercutio]

802.16 at least where I am is really crummy service. Less reliable than cable and generally slower than DSL. It's a shared pipe too, like 802.11 or cable. You'll only get decent speed is there aren't many transceivers associated with your tower and if there aren't a lot of p2p fiends on your "segment".

 

[theSwede]

i,

I do think I have mentioned 'move to Sweden' as a solution to a similar problem in another thread. :wink:
http://img269.echo.cx/img269/4421/speed8dj.png

/Micke

 

[i]

It turned out that Verizon's Fios service is not offered in my area of Arlington. I went with Speakeasy.

The first thing I learned is that, at least around here, Speakeasy is actually just a reseller of Covad's services. Had I known that earlier, I might have just gone straight to them as it's only $20 more per month to get the same service without Speakeasy as a middleman.

Second thing I learned about Speakeasy: their website design is poor.

Third thing I learned about Speakeasy: they have a large amount of out-of-date and/or otherwise incorrect information on their website about the services they offer.

(Sounds promising, doesn't it?)

Final installation is this Wednesday. This could become entertaining.

 

[i]

"Final installation is this Wednesday." Hah. Hah. Haaaah.

Fourth thing I've learned about Speakeasy: don't consider any installation date "final" until they actually bill you.

My order was officially completed on July 21st, just a few days shy of 2 months since placing the order.

The service is supposed to be 768Kbps SDSL. The actual results are about 585 Kbps down, and 605 Kbps up. Apparently -- and they decided to tell me this only after 2 months of waiting with various installation appointments along the way -- that I'm a little too far from the Central Office to provide a solid SDSL connection. Consequently my speeds aren't as good as they could be, and worse, the noise margins on my loop are poor. So occasionally my transfer rate falls through the floor, if only for brief moments. In other words, I'm a borderline case for having SDSL at all. (And it took them 2 months to tell me this.)

I'm sticking with it anyway. It's really the best option I have for now.

I have a one year contract. Maybe Fios will be available next year.

 

[i]

First question (multiple parts):

Am I crazy to have both web services and mail services on the same physical machine? Does anyone else do this?

 

[ddrueding]

No. I do it all the time. Just be sure that no logs/mailstores/web folders are on the system partition.

 

[i]

Thanks ddrueding. As I'm not going to need anything fancy in the way of web services, I'm planning on running this from an OpenBSD box. Most of the OS will go on an old U160 Seagate Cheetah I have lying around.

Beyond that, I'm planning on picking up 3 Samsung SATA drives and enabling software RAID (which will be a challenge because it requires a custom OpenBSD kernel) to get basic RAID 1 with a hot spare. /var, /var/log, /var/mail, and /var/www will all be on their own separate partitions, on that RAID.

Overkill? Probably. But then by definition it's impossible to have too much overkill.

 

[Pradeep]

At work we recently went to a T1, a real thing of beauty, we have VOIP on the same connection, it will dynamically allocate bandwidth if there are calls being made, otherwise we get the full T1 for data.

 

[i]

I had my service up and running less than one month when my service went down this past Wednesday during the afternoon. It came back up today, mid-morning. That's nearly 2 days of down time. This is a "business class" SDSL package. Is this something a business would normally expect? I don't know ... this is all new ground for me.

Anyway, to make the process of getting the failure repaired more interesting, Speakeasy's phone system has been malfunctioning. They were having trouble making outbound calls for follow-ups, and as an incoming caller, after dialing their number I kept getting either, a) silence, or b) the infamous recorded message, "We're sorry, all circuits are busy now. Will you please try your call again later. Thank you."

And once connected, either inbound or outbound calls were being dropped at random. That happened to me last night while trying to get a status update.

This evening I called back to report my service had been restored, and they were still having problems with dropped calls, and intermittent periods of silence during active calls (including mine).

If I had this to do all over again, and if I had a little more money available, I would go with Covad directly, and I would go completely nuts and spring for a T1. My primary 2 reasons for picking an SDSL setup with Speakeasy were for 1) static, Internet-accessible IP addresses with sane TOS, and 2) reliability. So far, I'm not all that impressed. Right now I'm feeling like I'm paying a mediocre amount of money for a mediocre service. I'd have rather gone with a lot of money for rock-solid service.

The other thing that's bothering me is that I really wanted to ditch Verizon and go with VoIP. Now I'm thinking Speakeasy's service is going to be problematic to the point that I can't risk dropping my regular phone line. And that annoys me because it's basically adding $30 to my monthly bill ... except it's $30 more that's going to Verizon every month.

 

[Pradeep]

2 days downtime for "business-class" is completely unacceptable. I would be demanding credit for the downtime.

With our T1 it gets escalated after 4 hours. Not that it has been down yet.

 

[mubs]

2 days downtime for "business-class" is completely unacceptable. I would be demanding credit for the downtime.

Seconded. Time for a polite but really stinging letter, registered mail.

 

[P5-133XL]

3rded - Business class means always up. Bussinesses can't afford to be down for any extended amount of time: It costs too much money.

 

[i]

Thanks guys. You prompted me to go look at exactly what their terms of service stipulate in a situation like this.

Speakeasy provides an uptime availability target of 99.9% for SDSL or IDSL services each calendar month. If Speakeasy fails to meet the availability target for a particular month, you may request a credit for 3% of your package's monthly recurring charge for each hour of service outage in excess of the availability target. By definition, a circuit is experiencing an outage if no traffic is exchanged on the line, or Speakeasy is unable to ping your router. Outage hours are rounded to the nearest hour and based on the time a vendor Trouble Ticket is created, indicated by the time stamp on the Trouble Ticket.

Speakeasy's target response time for initializing service restoration following phone notification of a SDSL or IDSL service outage is 24 hours. If Speakeasy is unable to meet this target response time, you may request a credit for 10% your package's monthly recurring charge. In no case shall the sum of target response time credits and uptime availability target credits during a calendar month exceed the total of your package's monthly recurring charge.

[Excerpted from here.]

Ironically, while this was 2 or 3 days before then end of my first month of service, that also meant it happened 3 days after my 25 day trial period. During that trial period I had the option to drop the service if I wasn't satisfied. Furthermore, with new orders placed after August 5th, 2005, you actually get 60 days as the trial period. Bad timing on my part I guess.

Anyway, I'll give them another call tonight ... assuming I can get through.

 

[i]

Wow. I have no idea what's been happening to my English skills lately. My last few posts here and elsewhere have been much worse than usual for me.

 

[i]

Personal conclusion: I will never recommend Speakeasy to anyone.

Last week I got a full refund for the month of August, based on Speakeasy's SLA and the fact that my service was down for 41 hours.

Then, as a result of that original failure, this past Wednesday a Covad tech came out and gave me a final, official answer: yes, I'm too far away from the central office to have reliable 768Kbps SDSL service.

It's been 3 months since I signed up.

And my service has been down again this week for a completely different reason since Thursday morning. This time my SDSL modem/router spontaneously lost all its settings. I've spent about 5 hours on the phone with various people at Speakeasy since Thursday. My service has only just come back up.

And I've had to drop to 384Kbps because I just can't afford to provide any excuse for further unreliability.

In a nutshell: the support staff are nice, and they really do try to help (though there have been multiple errors made by Speakeasy staff in various departments and at various levels, most of which I've caught because I've paid attention to everything they've said over the phone), but that is tempered by the fact that I have found their product to be extremely unreliable.

ACHTUNG. VERMEIDEN SIE.

 

[mubs]

Sorry to hear of your problems, i. Sometimes with all the research and care you put in, things still end up being a mess. What else can you do but move on? Since the overall product quality and experience is so bad, can you not ask SpeakEasy to terminate the contract without penalty to you and switch to somebody else?

 

[i]

You're right mubs. I'm already at the 'move on' stage.

I'll live with this service for now -- unless things take a turn for the worse again. Basically this is the best option I have for the moment, at least in terms of what I can afford. Hopefully by this time next year, A) I'll be able to afford something along the lines of a T1, and B) Verizon's FIOS will be around as another consideration.