Review by ozar 
UPDATED: 135 days ago
member for 235 days, 277 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
 USA
 $117 per month (24 month contract)
 about 3 days
 "Decent speeds for this area"
 "Drops connection often, speeds drop off a great deal several times daily"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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The only other options available to me in this area are dial-up, cable, and satellite. The cable service in this area is down quite often for no apparent reason, so I didn't consider that as a viable alternative.
I'm currently on the "Up to 10.0M download / 896k upload" package and the price I've listed for this review includes my regular phone line, plus the DSL service.
The initial order process (about 5 or 6 years ago) went fine and while it was a self-installation, the actual DSL signal was reaching my line in about 3 days and I was up and running. I started out with the 645 Series modem supplied by Sprint/Embarq and the 1.5 M download package, then I upgraded when 3 M package was available, then again when 5 M download package became available. In all cases, the upgrade was totally painless and without any effort on my part. However, when I recently upgraded to the 10 M downloads package, Embarq sent me a new modem (Embarq EQ-660R) that was supposed to be easy to install, but it turned out to be very problematic and took several different Embarq support techs a number of hours to get things so that I was up and running again.
The newly supplied modem drops the DSL sync signal quite often, but intermittently. In fact, it will sometimes drop out about every 5 or 10 minutes during the evening, then the signal re-syncs and you can connect again. Another thing that I've noticed that happens frequently is that the speed will suddenly drop drastically and I get download speeds around 5M/7M. Rebooting the modem will usually get things going faster again.
I recently replaced the ISP supplied modem with a D-link DSL-2540B modem/router and have not lost sync again since doing so. I've also not noticed the degraded speeds suddenly appearing, but I'm not certain just yet that all is fixed, as it's only been a few days since the ISP modem was replaced.
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