I suspect we'll hear lots of opinions on this one - but I'll throw in my $.02. I'll say up front that I work for an ISP that provides Qwest DSL, so my opinion may be somewhat slanted. First, AFAIK dish is only 1-way high-speed. And the latency sucks. I have no other experience with them - only that they've been hated by gamers because of the latency, and people that do interactive-type stuff like ssh/telnet a lot. Web and downloads are probably fine, and for your average user most of your traffic is incoming anyways, so depending on your usage this might not suck. DSL has been great for me. These "CraptionTec's" (ActionTec) that Qwest is distributing now suck in a few new ways that the cisco's didn't, but they're tolerable. I might try and find a 678 if I were getting new service. Then again, Qwest is trying to phase them out. On the b/w side, I get exactly the speed I would expect out of a 640k/272k PPPoATM connection back to Sihope. That is to say, I've never had a capacity problem across Qwest's ATM network, and I always get full speed downloading from Sihope and the upstreams we peer with. You lose 12.5% (?) bandwidth for ATM overhead, and some for PPP. I usually see above 500kbit/s throughput pulling data from anywhere on the net that can push that much. My speeds only suffer when I'm hitting a site that is busy, or doesn't have enough outbound capacity to saturate my link. I won't say which ISP to use with Qwest DSL - there are plenty around, and a few on this list. I will say to stay away from Qwest.net (now MSN), as it's been nothing but horror stories from the refugees we've had defecting to us after being with MSN. As far as cable goes, I've never had it. Some of my friends say it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, 10MBit throughput all the time, never goes down, etc. Someone I know in Eden Prairie has TWT cable and says it sucks - throughput is okay some of the time, but it's down a lot, support sucks, etc. I often wonder if "geek pride" prevents the friends in group #1 from telling the truth about their service, or if it's actually that much better in different areas. I also know someone that was running a VPN over some high port, and ATT started filtering it after a few weeks of constant traffic to it. Unless you get "business" cable, there's no way to get a static IP. Original MediaOne users have had to change e-mail addy's 3 times in 4 years (check my numbers here). MediaOne.com -> ATTbi.com -> Comcast. We have taken over 5 or 6 ISP's over the years, and they all are still using their original addresses. I can't even fathom what bone-headed decision lead to this, but it must have sucked for those poor punters that had to go through it. If you have line of site to our building (France & 494, so you're close) you might be able to get wireless to us. 11MBit of pure love. On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, nota12b wrote: > In my area (Minnetonka/Hopkins) I know Time Warner is available (what I have > now), I THINK dsl is/may be, and Earthlink DSL shows as available from the > Dish Network site (and only working with M$ Win products - blick!)... > Anybody have knowledge of which is better and why - or just as importantly > which is WORSE and why? Any/all info appreciated. > > $$ is a factor here and even dial-up may be forced into being an option, > so... > IF cable > THEN maybe not even have a landline phone hooked up > IF DSL > THEN most likely dish instead of cable > IF DSL thru DISH > THEN ... neither? > > Wil > > "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to > visit violence on those who would do us harm." - George Orwell > > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > Adam Maloney Systems Administrator Sihope Communications _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list