I love my ISP!

Aside from their awful no-prorated-refund policy, Earthlink's connections weren't bad. But $20/month for dial-up? I don't think so.

I tried Liberty Bay, another national provider with a much more reasonable rate -- awful connectons and customer service that couldn't tell me if the accounts had dynamic or static IPs.

I'm finally happy with Flashnet (who has recently merged with Prodigy, of all people). Good connections, and a good deal through this reseller ($10.83/month with a 1 year contract).

Ryan, heh, $20 is what I pay per month. My ISP was bought out by a cable company (a competent one, though)... this year, the cable company merged with a phone company or similar.

Lots of places seem to be giving away AT&T's service.

It just seems to me with high speed access coming down quickly in price, that $20/month is a lot to expect for dial-up service. Having worked at an ISP for a few months, I know that it's near impossible for local ISPs to get away charging less than that, but for National ISPs, especially those with huge corporate backing, there's no excuse, IMO.

Once DSL drops to $30/month, I'll consider switching from dial-up. :)

My ISP sucks, its a little isp that just serves our town, called Englewood Online. (how orignal) ,I have net madic running right now, so I can have some backup in my e-mail that im sending, to explain why there service is "Extremely Unreliable" . I get dropped in the middle of downloads. That sucks. Ever since I got back from vacation Ive had okay service until about 6pm, and then its all downhill from there. at 1am, I cant stay connected for longer than about 5 min. I pay $20, but GTE has wired DSL up to about 4 mi south of my house, when it gets here , I may switch to something that has some speed.

( the sorry part is that I acutally sent a resume to Englewood Online, to try to get a job there, but I suppose I might as well forget about that)

LOL, Tony... can you imagine them reading your resume? "Hmmm... Tony... the name sounds familiar... hey, can you guys check and see if he's a subscriber? Oh, he just sent an e-mail? What's it say?" :)

I had Pacific Bell DSL in San Francisco for about 9 months and I loved it. It was very fast (steady 1.5Mb/sec incoming) and was only down for about a total of 10 minutes over a 9 month period. All for only $50/month.

I moved to a different place in SF and we have a different DSL service, but it's been good so far (2.5 months). I foget the current provider.

So far, my experience with DSL has been very positive. I haven't had any connection problems and the speeds have been quite good. I couldn't imagine going back to a dial-up.

The new t-shirts rule, Ryan, is there any chace I could get one from you at the bbq for the 11.99? or are they all in someone elses' posession?
Matt

Matt --

Ah, so you noticed. :) They are all made as they are ordered, so, no I do not have a stack of them. However, if you would like to combine orders (I haven't ordered my stuff yet), then we can save on shipping costs. Let me know.

I just switched from Erols to Speakeasy because Speakeasy offers DSL and Erols doesn't and so far I've been rather pleased. The install went great and customer service has been very informative and good about keeping people up to date on system status and all that. Erols actually wasn't bad, either, though. When I first got them, it was awful with mail sometimes taking a week to get to me, but they got their act together and the last few years had been flawless.

I now LOVE my ISP, Thank god for Comcast Cable Internet Sevice.....only 3 hours till the line is installed. I think i'll cancel EWOL now.

There were some delays, but when it was all said and done, at peak time I got about 800k/sec , enough for a 4.17mb mp3 in 35 seconds. I can feel the raw speed now. YES I LOVE my ISP.

my ISP was just bought by a bigger company, OneMain.Com, and they've already pi**** a bunch off people off by removing access to a separate CGI server that used to be included in the old company's accounts. they didn't even warn anyone - just one day the scripts stopped running and a wee tiny little notice was posted at the new company's web site saying, "sorry."

sheesh. other than that, the connection has never been a problem, probably a little better even uinder the new guys and it's cheap - $138.00 a year for 56K dialup. peas.

Prodigy sucks, sucks, sucks. I am a middle-aged elementary school teacher, and I never used that word before Prodigy took over Flashnet. They are arrogant and uncaring, and I want my money back after weeks of no service, over 7 hours on hold in the last two weeks, and purely incompetent management decisions and poor communicationn from the top down to their tech support, sales, and billing staff. Class action lawsuit, anyone?

DJ -- I haven't had any problems since the Prodigy switchover, but I do plan on dropping the service at the end of my one-year contract and then going month-to-month and jump services until I go broadband.

Comcast @home is great except when the news server is down for 4 days and you call and they try to tell you it is working even though I am on the phone telling them its not!! and loads of other people are reporting the same thing..