[rescue] Highspeed access

[James Rice]

<soapbox>I live only 21 miles from downtown Dallas, but SWBell told me 
last month not to hold my breath waiting on DSL roll out here.  Hell, we 
can't even get voicemail. When I built my house , we were promised DSL 
by November.  I should have had a clue when it took three months to get 
analog dialtone, but I had faith.  I signed up on the email noitce 
program and waited.  All this was in 1999.

Then this June I had received an email that DSL was now available in my 
neighborhood, so I called and scheduled an installation.  I had been on 
ISDN at a cost of $110.00 (ISP and phone line charges)  per month  for 
three years.  The scheduled date came and went, no DSL package in the 
mail, no installer.  So I called them, and called them, and called them. 
 Finally the lady on the other end of the line admitted that they won't 
be able to provide DSL in Rockwall south of I-30 for at least another 
2-3 years so they had canceled the order.  She also informed me that it 
is not the SWB policy to inform the customer when the order was 
canceled  and I might as well seek alternatives.  So much for customer 
service.

That very day I noticed that our local cable comany had sold out to 
Charter.  I called them, and behold, the next day I  had cable broadband 
service.  The first two weeks, service was very spotty, down more than 
up, etc., but it is improving, so there is still hope.  And when service 
is down, I just route everything through  the ISDN router to my office 
in Dallas.  We have 2m/8m DSL from Sprint and 768k/3m DSL from SWBell 
there.</soapbox>

>The majority of the USA is not served by economical high speed Internet
>> access (consumer satellite doesn't count).