🚀 go-pugleaf

All,

I have settled in to a routine now with my home setup.

Web Browsing: DSL is lightning fast and very reliable, for browsing; there
is the ocassional glitch, but I think it is Netscape.  Overall: excellent.

Pacbell email: virtually unusable.  Its worse right now with their
oversubscribed services and people sending large video attachements in
email.   But sometimes I can't even send; and when I do, it can take 12
hours or more for an email to arrive to almost any destination including
back to myself.  Overall: poor.

Pacbell support: they acknowledge receiving questions in a reasonable time
frame, when I am able to send an email at all; but its hard to know yet if
they are good and fast at fixing things; I suspect there will be some
issues. I besdies the email slowness, there are no major issues.  They do
have a support web page, off of the main Pacbell.net site; but it won't
come up today.  Overall: fair.

Pacbell installer: he arrived promptly, did everything well and made sure
my modem could still dial out, even concurrently with a DSL session; I
have a home-built machine not a name brand and he did not care.  He seemed
genuinely interested in the whole process.  Overall: excellent.

Pacbell Shell account: does not seem to exist.  I will stick with a2i.
I would like to lower my costs but I need some of the services at the
Advanced level.  I think there ought to be a new account type,
like the web-only account, lets call it Telnet-Only for the DSL users that
want to stay at a2i for email and light shell use; but possibly, connected
for a lot of hours (I live in my email program).  

Conclusion: I love DSL for browsing and I telnet to a2i for email, regular
news, and stuff that I am used to doing off the shell.  I wish Pacbell
would just market this via the ISP's so you could just pay Rahul a single
fee, and it would all be automated.  Soon you can buy your own DSL modem
and do the home install yourself.  People seem hot to do that, but I would
discourage it; the installer I had went right to the outside box, and
tested the quality of the line; and cleaned and improved the connections
at the box.  He did a good job and most homeowners won't take that kind of
care.  He also had to put filters on all my phones on the same line.

Kevin

p.s. A note about feedback: despite the frustration that is ocassionally
expressed at a2i when there are outages and slowdowns without an
explanation from Support each time... well you don't get much at all from
Pacbell.  Things just move along.  So in that regards also, in comparison,
a2i is excellent at communications.
-- 

Kevin
kjs@rahul.net
Discuss@DomainsAndIdeas.com