3:00 AM this morning was the last time I’ll ever use DSL.

Around 3:00 AM today, I noticed my connection dropped. I tried everything I could, but to no avail. I spent almost three hours trying to figure it out. I gave up and went to bed.

I called Verizon in the early afternoon about the problem. Long story short, it seems my line had two IPs, and that was the cause of the problem. OK.. so what do do about it? While I was on hold, I thought about all the cool ways they could handle this, from clearing my line, to doing some fantastic line “sweep” and clear all the shit off the line. Their solution– unplug your computer for eight hours, then tray again.

ROFL Copters

I almost laughed in the guys face. Eight hours? Then try again? So if that doesn’t work, I loose a day, and then get to spend the next day trying to get it to work? No thank you. So, in my usual form, I went out to Circuit City, bought a cable modem and a Comcast Internet kit and signed up for cable service.

Since I only ever used DSL with PPPoE, it took me a while getting my AirPort DHCP settings correct. I’m used to doing the same thing I’ve been doing, and I had to do a few things different to get it setup. On top of that, I was working with a faulty AirPort Extreme base station, so I had to switch to my AirPort Express.

Easy Setup

After creating my account, and setting up the network preferences, and setting up all four of my Macs, I was good to go. First speed tests gave me like 20Mbps down, which is much more than I should be getting. I’m paying for eight, but as you can see from the speed tests, I’m getting a good deal more. My upload is the same as my Verizon DSL.

So for $52.95/month I get advertised 8Mbps/768Kbps speeds, versus my DSL speeds of 3Mbps/768Kbps. It’s more expensive than DSL, but it’s faster, and I hope more reliable in the long run. I also paid $79.99 for the cable modem, with a $20.00 mail-in-rebate that will probably end up in the trash.

So far I’m impressed by the speed, and it’s certainly and upgrade. I’ll be seeing over the next few days how the network is, and seeing if I do run into any problems.

This article was written by Bryan Los on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 8:06 PM and is filed under Internet, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.