Review by jayvise 
Posted: 10.3 years ago
member for 10.3 years, 0 visits, last login: 10.3 years ago
 New Orleans,Orleans,LA
 Contract price not specified.
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Bell South Residential ADSL
I have mostly enjoyed my residential Bell
South ADSL service here in New Orleans. However, due
to a few lingering problems, I give the service a "B."
The Installation
The $300.00 installation price was an initial
sticker shock that took a while to get over. After
about two months on the waiting list, Bell South
emailed me to let me know that my home could now be
blessed with 1.5 Mbs downloads, amen. My installation
was set on a Wednesday evening last December; however,
the installers never showed. After a dozen calls that
night and the next day, Bell South still swore that
I'd gotten my dates mixed up. Not likely -- I'd
called earlier in the week to confirm the
installation.
After that minor speedbump, the installers
showed up the next evening on time. They made it
clear that they were NOT Bell South employees, and
that they'd been contracted to do the installation (as
is the norm.) They were pleasant and professional,
and the entire installation took about ninety minutes.
The only part of the installation process that I
rate as wanting was the complete lack of documentation
and/or support manuals. The ADSL worked immediately,
and I spent the next eight hours in awe of the
throughput speeds.
The Service
Fast! Much faster than the ISDN I'd utilized in
school and work, and light years ahead of any dial-up
modem. Downloading a 10 meg game in under two minutes
was definitely heaven.
However, over the next couple of weeks, my
ADSL
service would lock up, requiring a complete re-boot of
the system. This usually occurred only after my
computer had remained on for more than three hours.
After a two days of this, I called Bell South;
however, I had not been given the ADSL support number,
and the customer service tech at the "regular" Bell
South ISP did not know it either. It took another two
hours to track down the ADSL support number.
After a winsock upgrade, the problem of the
service locking up eventually went away. However, in
December 1998 and January 1999, the entire New Orleans
Bell South ADSL service went down several times. The
longest outage was at least six hours. I do much of
my work research at home, and it did grind on my
nerves when the ADSL customer service tech suggested
that I use the Bell South dial-up service during the
ADSL outages. Grrr....
Most of these problems seem to have cleared up,
but a couple of new ones are now rearing their heads.
Bell South's use of caching has caused quite a few
problems with many of its customers, myself included.
Real-time access to many web sites via ADSL is often
impossible and unpredictable due to caching,
compounded by Bell South's complete silence on the
issue. In particular, downloads of popular software
such as Netscape is often impossible for Bell South's
ADSL users, due to its caching of popular web sites.
Hundreds of posts on Bell South's own support
newsgroup concerning the caching issue have gone
ignored, and the customer service techs similarly have
no answers. Apparently, they do know of the issue,
since they (again) advise customers to "use the Bell
South dial-up ISP for critical, time-sensitive web
sites," such as stock quotes, etc.
The Verdict
I'm very pleased with the raw speed of the ADSL
service, but because of the unresolved caching issue,
along with the unevenness of support, I would not yet
reccomend this service for any intensive business
setting. I still recommend it to friends and
colleages for residential access, and for non-critical
business uses. The service has a ways to go, but I
give it a solid "B." If Bell South's support and
reliability start approaching that of Mindspring or
other ISPs, I would be inclined to bump it to an "A."
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