William Brown wrote:
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.

Whoever put it under ground would be responsible for the maintenance.
All our utilities are overhead except gas and water.

--

Travis in Shoreline (just North of Seattle) Washington
USDA Zone 8
Sunset Zone 5