Southwestern Hell Internet Services

All that changed on 18 Nov 2000, when SBIS unilaterally instituted changes that killed 900 vDSL feeds in the Richardson, Tx. SBIS knew it was going to happen, and even notified some of their partner companies ahead of time. Did they tell their clients? (Do I have to answer that)?

SBSI Tech Support was, I believe, kept in the dark about all this; they simply did not know what was going on. The best source of information on the problem was to be found from other users in news:swbell.adsl and news:dfw.internet.providers. After 5 days of run-around, one user with a packet sniffer realized the static IP customers had their IPs changed as well; I finally figured out which ones I had and was back online 132 hours after the original outage. Of course, I had to change the IPs on all the servers, change the DNS, change the host information at the InterNIC, etc. A bad, bad experience.

As soon as my contractual obligation to SBIS is over, I'm defecting to august.net. [original page archived below]

my @home to xDSL experience

The problem is that it wasn't (in my case) very stable. I experienced minutes-long outages (lost sync) almost every day, a few hours each week, and usually a day or two each month. Longest outage was two weeks. This is ok for a casual user; I work at home and really do need stability. Yes, I know, @home was designed for light residential rather than business use. I agree.

Complicating matters was that I was running my linux box (sendmail, apache, etc) off that network, so I needed greater uptime. In fact, a 64k ISDN would have been a better choice for me because I care more about stability than bandwidth. (when I signed up, @home had no "no server" language in the documentation I signed).

Here is a listing of my complaints:

• massive instability. I started running a script that pinged and recorded downtime. I usually forgot to run it but you'll get an idea. The cablemodem lost synch so often that I propped it up so I could see the synch light at all times. My wife got tired of hearing me say "fscking cable's down again".
• long wait times for tech support (got better in late 1999). The average wait time for tier 1 support in 1999 was 43 minutes (my speakerphone has a timer). Shortest was 38 mins, longest was 108 mins. Then a similar wait for tier 2...
• insane scheduling for onsite techs. The shortest time I was ever scheduled was 14 days; the longest was 35 days. "yes sir, I know your feed is completely dead. We'll have someone out there in 35 days". Can you believe that? I scheduled eight onsite linechecks; every single time the issued resolved itself before the tech could get there.
• If you say the word "@home" to your local provider they will immediately transfer you to @home HQ in Boulder. Even if you know the problem is with the local infrastructure (like you can see out your window that somebody just backhoed your cable line). I subscribed to basic cable just so I could tell the local maroons when their cables were fried. HQ and your local provider cannot communicate effectively. It's real left-hand/right-hand stuff.
• They would reassign one of more of my IPs every few months. Oopsie! "Yeah, looks like we handed those out again.... uhhh.... you can request more from the webpage". True, I mean changing IPs on a workstation is no big deal. But it screws up my DNS (which I shouldn't be doing anyway, I know, I know).
• Quite literally the only thing that worked consistently was billing.

SW Bell vDSL

the verdict

It's not stable enough to work from home. Don't waste your time or $$$. [an error occurred while processing this directive]