I had to also go the the PSC to get US West to bill me correctly on ISDN. I'm aware of many other US West horror stories.
Yes. And I could tell you a few, or go over to their usenet group and collect dozens more.
But in fairness to the DSL service, it was easy to install the actual DSL equipment on my end. I did it myself to save the installation fee and was really surprised at how simple it was. Once you have a network card in the computer (which might be scary to some), all that's required is hooking the Cisco router to a phone line, hooking the router to the network card in the computer, and putting a filter on each analog phone line. (Because of the configuration used on them, new installations should also set the password in the router for security reasons. But doing so is not, unfortunately, necessary to get the service running.)
I'm sure one could run into problems in doing any of that, but it's surprising that few of the posters to the uswest.dsl newsgroup complain about installation problems. Most of the complaints have to do with US West's dreadful office back-end systems. (And with another configuration issue that's not relevant here.)
I say all this just to indicate that, although there are problems with DSL installations, they don't necessarily have to be painful. Because they don't require a "truck roll", they can be simpler to get running than cable modems, but only if one is working with a company less incompetent than US West. |
