On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 12:42, Carl Lindholm wrote: > Does anyone out there recommend Qwest dsl for internet. Is there an > alternative? There's an alternative that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Everyone says "Don't use QWest MSN as your ISP", and I agree. But there's another way: you can use Qwest as your ISP, but there's no MSN involved. I think they call this "Qwest Internet Basic". Basically, all you get from Qwest in this mode is an IP address (dynamic, of course; a static IP will cost you an additional $4.99/month IIRC). You don't get an email account or any storage for your web site, nor (to my knowledge) is there any shell access provided. But since you're hosting your own mail and web servers, you don't need that do you? :-) The best part about this approach is that it's cheap, cheap, cheap: $6.99/month (plus the cost of your DSL connection, of course). My total cost per month for this setup is: $28.00 1.5Mb down / 1.0Mb up (max; I don't actually get that) 6.99 Qwest Internet Basic (i.e., basic ISP service) 4.99 1 Static IP address 3.99 ActionTech DSL Modem rental (yeah, yeah, I know ...) ------ 43.97 Qwest doesn't block ports or protocols on your residential DSL line (at least, I haven't run into any problems along those lines). Everybody likes to crab about Qwest and I have to admit I've done it myself, and I've occassionly run into the totally clueless service droid on their support lines, BUT (and it's an important "but"), my experience has been once you get everything set up and working correctly, it's great. (In fairness, I should say I have also dealt with some extremely cluefull Qwest service reps, too. In particular the installer that set up my phone service in my new house and "David", the guy I dealt with when I ordered service for my new house, were both outstanding.) -- Jeff Clark "Too soon old, too late smart." mailto:jeff at jeffclark.net http://www.citilink.com/~jclark ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft's success proves "You can fool some of the people, all of the time." _______________________________________________ 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