[sllug-members]: DSL in SLC

[Knight Walker]

Having just signed up with Xmission for DSL (My line is supposed to be
turned up today), I can answer most of these.

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 11:18 -0700, Steve Dibb wrote:

[snip]

> 1.  Do I have to get an account with Qwest?  If so, how do I get them to 
> provide *just DSL*, and no phone line, or any other bundled stuff.  Is 
> that possible?  If so, what's my total monthly bill going to be from them?

For the time being, you will.  DSL is a lot like the old dial-up world
where you pay the phone company for the line and you pay your ISP for
the service.  As for getting "just DSL" (aka "standalone DSL" and "naked
DSL") from Qwest, you can, but it will cost you extra.  I'm not kidding.
Xmission quoted me a $27-per-month ("Plus taxes and surcharges") for the
DSL-only line, but when Qwest called me later, they said it's
$36-per-month (plus taxes and whatever else they can gouge you for) for
only the DSL line.

Anyway, if you call Xmission directly, their sales person will use an
online form for Qwest on your behalf to order just the DSL (That's what
he did for me), it's fairly painless.

The total monthly bill will most likely be $17+Qwest's charges for
1.5Mbit/896k up DSL or $22+Qwest's charge for Multi-meg DSL (3Mbps,
5Mbps, or 7Mbps download (speed depends on line quality) / 896k upload).
Xmission does have a 100GB/month quota, but if you exceed that, you can
buy extra bandwidth pretty cheap.

> 2.  What are the speeds like?  I grew up with a 2400 baud modem and 
> BBS's so I'm familiar with kbps speeds, not megabit.  Right now I'm 
> averaging between 800K/s and 1.5 megabytes/second with Comcast.  I'm not 
> picky on speed though (as long as it's generally fast / stable).  It 
> looks like Xmission offers "multi-megabit" whatever that is.

That, unfortunately I can't answer until at least sometime tomorrow, but
if it's as advertised, you'll be doing about 140-180K/sec down for the
1.5Mbit DSL.  From what I've seen, the "Multi-meg" is usually a 10x
decrease from the "bit" rating (e.g. 5Mbit is ~500k), so with that math,
your Comcast has been working at something like 8-15Mbit, when it works.

One thing I like about DSL is that your bandwidth isn't shared as much
as with cable.  The other is that most cable net service I've seen tops
out around 256-512Kbit upstream.  Plus a lot of the cable ISPs terms are
rather onerous and a lot of their subnets are blacklisted as spam
sources.

> 3.  Do I have to sign a contract?

I haven't signed one yet.  From what I've heard, you can sign up for a
"price for life" service, and that requires a 2-year contract, but I
have yet to receive anything to sign.

> 4.  How does that work with the modem?  Do you just rent one, or can you 
> buy one and save paying an eternal renter's fee?

The modem can either be rented from Qwest for something like $5 a month,
or if you're feeling adventurous, you can buy a good Cisco 678 from eBay
for under something like $50.  It won't do Wifi for you like a lot of
the rentals do, but if that's not a problem, most people I talk to like
the Cisco better.  So long as the modem/router does "DMT" (Which they
all should anymore), it should be fine.

-KW