Travis wrote:

William Brown wrote:

I had DSL, which requires a land line. My research showed that
switching to cable for internet (I already had cable for TV) and
getting the cell phones would save me quite a bit. I've only had
the cable a couple of weeks and it is markedly faster than DSL (I
had to run tests to confirm this, as both cable and DSL are faster
than I can see). Now I'm waiting to see if the cable is reliable,
before dumping the land line. Of course, if cable isn't in your
area its not an option.
Rubaiyat of Omar Bradley wrote:

A friend has DirecTV's DirecWay for his internet connection and
does not use a landline [not required].

Yes, I'm familiar with Direcway, but unfortunately it would cost
more than 2 times as much as a landline. It would be much faster
than dialup, but for that kind of money I can afford to wait for a
few seconds for each page to load. Here is a price quote from the
DirecWay website:

"DIRECWAY gives you two ways to pay. Our up-front option lets you
pay $599.98 now, and then just $59.99 for Home service or $89.99
for Professional service per month for 15 months. Prefer to spread
out your payments? Then simply pay $99.99 up front, and $99.99 for
Home service or $129.99 for Professional service per month for the
first 15 months. After the 15th month, your monthly fee will drop
to the $59.99 or $89.99 rate per month."

John Cowart


My DSL 3.0/768 (Verizon) has unlimited downloading as well as an
excellent news server. Cable access in my area is provided by Comcast
with a secret download cap and so I've heard lousy news service.

Certainly the provider is an important issue. I started with a small
local company where the techs were good and even the owner would enter
discussions on a newsgroup they maintained. Unfortunately, they were
bought out by a larger company, and tech support declined, prices
increased, and instead of keeping their own usenet servers, they just
subscribed to one of the big services. Retention actually improved, but
you could no longer call up and ask them to add a newsgroup; they said
they just had to take what the service provided.

When I realized cable would save me so much, I called the cable company
and asked what newsgroups they carried; they didn't know, but just said
there were a lot of them. Finally I went to a users forum and posted a
list of the newsgroups I follow, and another user checked and said they
were all there. Actually, the savings were great enough that I could
have subscribed to one of the services and still come out ahead. Usenet
is used by so few customers that the ISPs are not willing to put a lot
of resources into it. When I had my small, savvy, ISP, the owner posted
that fewer than 5% of their clientele used usenet; he only kept it up
because he was an old techie himself from the days of bulletin boards.

Just to stay on topic, my cable and phone lines run in a plastic conduit
under my garden and driveway, and apparently the cable isn't as
waterproof as they thought, so I have intermittent signal loss (the
signal is constantly good enough for digital tv, but only intermittently
for internet) so we are looking at getting a more waterproof cable, or
somehow circulating air through the conduit to keep it dry.