However, it took him a couple of weeks to convince Verizon's sales department that he really, truly, did want to take them up on their offer, whereas my order was processed even faster than they said it would be. During the holiday (sorry, BillO) Christmas season, no less. So he got slow service up front, and I got tech-support-hell on the back end.
Of course, I'm running Win98 on a machine of comparable age, and he's running WinXPSP2 on a virtual newborn of a machine. So that might explain the installation issues. (Although, both the Web-based diagnostic tool and a Verizon sales rep assured me that my PC was good to go.)
I have been using my DSL connection for a few days now, and I can't find anything major to complain about. The speediness is nice. Of course, all of the Verizon web pages, like help files, configuration forms, etc., seem to break unless you use Internet Explorer to visit them, but that's to be expected from a corporate giant. Because only like 100 million people have downloaded Firefox in the last year.
At any rate, if you want to switch from dial-up to DSL, for probably less money than you're paying for dial-up, then check out this site. For $15/month, you get 768Kbps download connectivity. If you want to spend $30/month, you can get 3Mbps. As with all home-based plans, the upload speed is considerably less. You have to commit for a year to get these prices, but they will toss in a wireless modem/router/gateway for free, if you do.
I can't whole-heartedly recommend this deal. Like all cheap things, it seems that you're going to spend some time in return for saving some money. And if you need tech support, count on talking to people who would be equally challenged by asking "Would you like fries with that?" But I'd give it a "worth a look" recommendation.
Man, I just wrote all that, when it occurs to me that I'm probably the last guy on the planet to go broadband.
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