Re: Changing my ISP

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

<rant>
AT&T's provisioning and installation process is finally complete and my
new service is up and running. I still have a lot of work to do before
everything I want is running, but that's up to me.

In a word, AT&T's provisioning system sucks. It's a horribly fragmented
process in which every step is done by a different person. It may as
well be called The U-verse Full Employment System. It's no wonder things
get screwed up. Far be it for me to tell AT&T how they should do things,
but a more intelligent and efficient way would be to assign one (and
ONLY one) person as a new customer's agent throughout the provisioning
and installation process.
</rant>

In purely technical terms, U-verse high speed data service hauls butt.
At 12 Mbps the average throughput is about 1.3MB/sec. It takes about a
hour to download a Fedora 13 DVD ISO. My repository update script rsyncs
the EPEL, Cygwin, CentOS 5, Fedora 13, Fedora 14 development, Rawhide,
and RPM Fusion repos. It takes less than eight minutes to complete if
there are no changes. That used to take 45 minutes.

AT&T is a Tier 1 carrier, so I shouldn't have any isolation problems
caused by a failure of a single-thread upstream connection. That
happened three or four times in six years with Wisper. I'll lose
connectivity if some cretin with a backhoe digs up the fiber to the
tombstone cabinet up the street. If that ever happens I'm pretty sure
I'm allowed to shoot said backhoe operator. AT&T may even pay a bounty.

I am having problems setting up a Linksys WRT54GS as the interior
router/firewall. Steve thinks the stock firmware in the Linksys may not
be up to the task, so I'll try Tomato or DD-WRT. Once the local network
is up and secure, I'll start on all the projects that have been waiting
so long for reliable high speed connectivity.

--Doc

P.S. I'll be calling Nathan Stooke at Wisper to let him know they can
recover their radio and antenna from my roof. Wisper's inability to
provide me reliable Internet service had nothing to do with them and was
caused by the overcrowded and unregulated radio spectrum at 900MHz. I'll
continue to recommend Wisper to anyone looking for  telecommunications
services in the Metro East area.


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