[rescue] looking for a Multia

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:03:54AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   You using a modem or something?

Yep, I'm stuck in dial up.  Well, actually, that's not even working
right now, either, but hopefully it will be by the end of the day.

I moved.  There is no high speed internet service convienient to the
apartment building I now live in.   I've had the apartment for 4 weeks
today, and I still haven't been able to get definate answers from
Comcast and Verizon about what options exist.  The phone company
insisted on connecting my apartment to a switch that is 4 miles away
instead of the one that is 2-3 miles away.  The apartment building does
not have any pre-existing cable service run to it, so cable would have
to be run from the road, which is down a 3-4 tenths of a mile lane.  The
cable company won't even talk to me, actually, they will only talk to
the landlord.  I'm supposed to have an answer about whether the cable
company will do it and what the potential cost would be early this week,
but it hasn't come through.

ISDN is definately available, but with a hefty install and a 30-60 day
lead time on installation.  Further, I haven't been able to get the
phone company to give me the business pricing talked about on
dslreports.  Instead they keep running me around for hours then dump me
on residential, which is obscenely expensive (dslreports.com reports
that business service is far cheaper in this case).  Verizon wireless is
also available.  The speed on that ranges from 40k to 144k.  They won't
say what I'd actually get from my apartment.  They aren't even clear on
what model phone would be best.  Both ISDN and Verizon Wireless require
a 2 year contract, and I don't know that I'm really all that likely to
stay longer than a year.  Obviously I only want to go with either of
these as a fall back position after everything else is ruled out.

BTW, no one was willing to give me authoratative answers about whether
DSL or cable were available until after I took the place.  I hate
comcast and verizon.  I look forward to the day that I can just pick up
a fractional T to either epix.net or D&E (two local companies that have
been nice to deal with in the past), or better yet, maybe Patrick would
want to expand into that area of business.