[rescue] wire my house!

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 12:06:31PM +0000, Peter wrote:

> This only affects a very tiny minority of lines which is why you won't
> have encountered it. It's usually a surprise to the poor sods who try
> to get ADSL from a decent ISP and then discover they have no choice in
> the provider and they get BT instead.

That's better than you have here in Israel. Here there are two choices
aDSL from BEZEQ, the 'phone company, and cable internet from HOT, the
cable company.

However, neither is an ISP. They only provide the communications
infrastructure. To actually access the Internet you need to have an
account with an ISP. To connect to the ISP, you need to have a VPN.

The ISPs have a price war going on. They offer you a deeply discounted
price 100 NIS ($22) a month for line and ISP but retain the option to
raise it, even if you pay a year in advance. Once you exceed their
unpublished limits, they drop your discount.

One ISP has a hidden limit of about a gigabyte DOWNLOAD a month on their 
lowest price plan. Woe to the poor guy who exceeds it.

I have a very expensive plan, about 300 NIS ($65) each to the cable company
and my ISP. It provides 170k bits per second upload and 3m bps down, very high
rates for here. It is also unlimited as I have at times exceeded 1g BYTES
down per day.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667  IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
The trouble with being a futurist is that when people get around to believing
you, it's too late. We lost. Google 2,000,000:Hams 0.