I signed up Sunday for AT&T’s FastAccess Lite DSL Term, otherwise known as $10 DSL. It requires a 12 month commitment, is only 768 Kbps down and 128 Kbps up, and requires your own DSL modem, but for the price its a deal … especially if AT&T loses money on it, and I have my reasons for, uh, wishing that to happen. While its true that the $10 deal does not appear on the FastAccess page, if you enter your phone number in the availability box the Term option for $10/month does appear which is the one you need.
The customer self-install kit arrives shortly. I expect it to be a CD and perhaps a DSL line filter if I’m lucky. I picked up a DSL modem from Craigslist on Friday for $20 and will have it ready to go once the DSL is turned up. I’ll let y’all know my impressions of the service once I’ve had a chance to test drive it. The big issue is whether the limited bandwidth will be enough to support the web demos I do as part of my work from home.
I remembered the conversation I had with a Bellsouth tech a few years ago who told lurid tales of 100 megabit speeds on the horizon. Guess it depends on what “horizon” is. On a related note, how can the rank and file at Bellsouth be so nice when the executives are so crooked?
Update: Kelly told me tonight (11/13) that the AT&T tech came by this afternoon to complete the install. Once I get back in town I’ll plug in my DSL modem and hopefully packets will flow like magic.
The whole bandwidth thing is problem for the phone companies. They want to make money without really trying–actually engineering their network to deliver the bandwidth they claim. They have been in a very good regulatory environment for the last 7 years or so. They don’t have to share their last mile access, they get all the stats slanted to make it look like they are doing a better job than they really are, and they pretty much get to charge what ever they want. They can all see the reckoning coming; so, they are trying to put stuff out to improve their actual record as fast as they can. AT&T did this number to get one of their mergers approved, Sprint finally expanded broad band to the Lake Gaston Area, maybe even ComCast will do something generous as people begin to pile in on their lack of net neutrality. I would not be surprised if there is little difference between your throughput and and the next level up. That will be true until they browbeat their suppliers to figure something out. Hopefully it will be reasonably graceful.