[geeks] Re: [rescue] Anyone try/look into DirectvDSL service?

[Jonathan Sadler]

Ken -

I had DirectTV DSL service for about a year and mostly liked it. My DSL
loop was provided to DTV by Rhythms.  This was quite cool as opposed to
the other underlying loop providers used by DTV, because Rhythms was
providing 768k SDSL, not ADSL.

Unfortunately, Rhythms went bankrupt a few months back.  To keep their
customers live, DTV transitioned their Rhythms-serviced customers here
in Chicago to Ameritech 1.5m/128k ADSL (not to be confused with
Ameritech's ISP arm) and Ameritech's engineering rules stated that you
had to be within 12k feet of the CO to use their service.  Since I am
more than 12k feet away (12400!), I was dropped as a customer. (DTV only
provides service on a month-to-month basis so there were no contractual
obligations they had to live up to.)

Thats all right, I found another CLEC (Focal) that had less stringent
engineering rules, and now have service from one of their partner ISPs.
They are providing 768k/128k ADSL for about $50.00/month.  Not as good
as what I had (or would have had if not dropped) with DTV, but better
than returning back to my ISDN connection :^)

Some notes:

  - DTV does not always communicate effectively with their customers.
    I remember one call to DTV right after Rhythms filed for bankruptcy
    where I asked "what are you going to do to keep me in service?"
    They couldn't even give me a canned "we're working on it".  It
wasn't
    until 15 days later that the emailed me stating I was going to be
    dropped.  This was 15 days lost in getting an order into a different

    service provider.  If the FCC hadn't stepped in and suspended the
    shutdown of the Rhythms network, I would have had a 25 day outage.
    Because of this I had to sign up for an ISDN account anyway.

  - DTV as outsourced parts of their system.  I remember when they
    transitioned the outsourcing firm used for their email service.
    I ended up with about 10 days where I couldn't log into their
    email servers.  Fortunately, the majority of my mail is handled
    through other email servers, including my own :^)

  - It seems that portions of their backbone network use static routes.
    This is derived from the long durations of "failures" in the
    backbone that 30 or so minutes later were fixed by transitioning
    the traffic through a different backbone node as well as the
    common place of routing loops.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Jonathan Sadler