[wplug] Residential DSL in Pittsburgh

[John Strange]

Okay,

I have worked in 3 seperate ISP's for a living, and so I probably have a
bit of appreciation for my ISP cause I know how hard it can be to do the
things they do.

If you can get it, get Armstrong Cable:

There are some drawbacks, but their service, reliability, and price is
far greater than anyone else.

Drawbacks: caps, and ports below 1024 are filtered (blocked)

Advantages:

Speed: I see 192K per second, which is my cap consistently in my area,
and I'm in a large residential area, even upstream cap of 60K I see.  I
did pay a bit extra for the SOHO speed.  People that think a full T1 is
not fast enough for residential type service are just trying to get by
doing something they probably should not be doing. 

Customer Service: 

Since they are my cable service as well I might as well brag about the
awesome picture I get for their High def cable service, they only
provide a few channels in HDTV right now cause of contract negotiations,
but it's AMAZING.  My cable box went out on a Saturday, and we called
their support 45 minutes later a cable guy showed up and BAM insta new
box.. Yes that was on a Saturday too...

Their billing system is amazing as well, they seem to autocredit any
downtime in their cable modem system, and I'm telling you that this sort
of automation is very DIFFICULT to obtain.

Drawbacks:

Port blocking, well for those of us who don't know what the heck is
going on, well it's a good thing.  But for those of us who want to run
personal services such as email and web services well it kind of sucks.

Although they don't block local peer stuff, it seems to be filtered a
bit further up the chain so you do have your physically connected
devices hitting your machine.  It's funny watching UPNP network setup
requests come out across your LAN.

In my 8+ years of Internet service, Armstrong has been simply amazing..

- John

On Mon, 2003-04-07 at 12:20, Russ Schneider wrote:
> Ingimarson, Darin wrote:
> 
> > Anybody have any recommendations for a linux-friendly residential
> > DSL or cable-modem provider in the Pittsburgh area?
> 
> I use Stargate DSL and it works perfectly.  I doubt the customer-support 
> people would be very helpful should I need them however.
>