My ISP sold off their local dialup ports and bought a chunk of lines from
MegaPOP.com. I've got DSL and I rarely use dial-up, but a friend who's tried
to use my dial-up account said the Phx number is always busy. I'm getting
ready to dump them anyway. (With a DSL account, you can get dial-up with
QWest for an extra $5/mo, but it's only good in major cities served in the
QWest service area. No local POP => long distance dialup.)
I had SpeedChoice for a while, but switched to QWest DSL earlier this year.
The big caveat about getting Sprint Broadband (aka, 'SlowChoice' now) is that
while you get an Earthlink email account, it's not really yours! Sprint and
Earthlink are independent companies, and they're totally screwed up when it
comes to these accounts. The Broadband accounts are owned ("parented" in
Earthlink's terminology) by Sprint, so when you shut off your Broadband
service, your Earthlink userids are gone. Permanently. They have no
provision for you to keep your Earthlink account active separate from the
Broadband service, and as far as they're concerned, the userids belonged to
Sprint, not you. So if you get another Earthlink account, you won't be able
to reclaim "your" old userids. And they won't keep the email addresses up
more than 24 hours after the Broadband account has been deactivated. (They
don't tell you any of this up front, and it's not in any of their "fine
print".) Now, while my Broadband acct was active, the Earthlink acct was
very handy while travelling, as they provide lots of POPs and an 800# to use
when you're not near a local POP. I could never determine whether the 800#
was totally free or had a limited number of hours each month, but the dial-up
was free and it always worked when I tried using it. If I didn't already have
two ISPs, I might consider getting an Earthlink acct just for my travel
needs. However, I think I've found something better...
Check out iPass (
http://www.ipass.com). They charge about 5 cents / minute
for dial-up access and have some 3500 POPs around the US, and even more
internationally! They used to charge a minimum of $2.50/mo, but they've
restructured and you need to go through one of their partners; I'm not sure if
they have a monthly minimum or not. I'm investigating what it would take to
partner with them or resell their services.
If money's not an object (or you have a rich uncle or a generous boss),
consider Ricochet for local access here in Phx and a few other cities. A
friend of mine says he gets 125kb-200kb throughput pretty consistently, which
rates it about equivalent to or better than basic ISDN service. And it's
completely portable. The downside: it's $70/mo.
FYI: I've just found a cool service at DYNU.COM. You can register with them
for free (get 'yourname.dynu.com') or a small annual fee (use your own domain
name); put their (4) DNS server IDs into your domain registration (for the
fee-based option); then you run a little app on your box that pings their
server periodically and tells it what your box's incoming IP address is. They
support Windoze and Linux (maybe Mac, I didn't notice). I was ready to have
my QWest DSL service upgraded to support static IPs, but with Dynu.com, I
won't need that. The break-even is around 25 domain names, so if you want to
vhost fewer than 25 domains, it's cheaper to go with Dynu than static IPs on
QWest's DSL. You could use Dynu to host a server off your laptop as you're
travelling!
-David Schwartz
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