Review by RvLeshrac 
UPDATED: 49 days ago
member for 9.3 years, 118 visits, last login: 32 days ago
 Smyrna,Cobb,GA
 $49 per month (12 month contract)
 about 5 days
 BellSouth
 "Speedy equipment shipping, on-time provisioning, technical support, availability."
 "Pricing, service offered, long-term and tier-1 support."
 "You could do MUCH worse, but no longer a prime choice."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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$49/month, 6-month initial contract.
*** UPDATE ***
Goodbye, Earthlink, I hardly knew ye (anymore).
About 2-3 months ago, I signed up for Clear's WiMax service, given that they were offering the Home/Mobile package (+eq. rental) for $10 more than my ELink service, at twice the rated speed. Oh, and AT&T rolled a truck to fix a neighbor's phone or something, and disconnected my phone line. For a week. Leaving me with no phone and no internet access.
I'll say that my experience with ELink had its ups and downs, but it has mostly been downs over the past few years.
I don't have any real regrets, however, about staying with them for 9 years. I can still recommend them, with a straight face and a clear conscience, over AT&T's DSL offerings. If only the price was substantially lower......
The connection reliability did improve dramatically over my last update to the review. The only serious downtime I had was when AT&T screwed everything over. The connection SPEEDS, however, did not fare so well. Despite being rated for 3mbit, I never saw better than 200kbyte/s downstream speeds.
Support never improved, though it did remain consistently average. I would say "consistently terrible," but I have had experience with a number of ISPs (dealing with family/friends/business associates' connections), and I can say that ELink is hardly the worst of them. While they won't necessarily be able to *do* anything but read from their scripts, they will often at least break from them long enough to listen to you, will call you back if they say they will, and won't keep you on hold for eons.
Closing down my email accounts was sad, like moving from an old home. I felt a twinge when I disconnected my DSL modem for the last time.
*** UPDATE ***
Now $49.99/month, and I'm on the last month of my 12-month contract (I believe.)
Big change from the old Mindspring days.
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1.5Mbps/300k up/downstream
*** UPDATE ***
1.5/128 u/d now. Another big change from the old Mindspring days.
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Hardware:
ZyXel Prestige 642M ADSL Bridge
(»www.zyxel.com/html/product/xdsl/p642.html)
1 Line Swapper (required by some lines for Alcatel equipment)
Cat5 Crossover (~10 feet?)
XX Foot DSL cord (2-wire phone cord)
Linksys LNE100TX 10/100 Autoswitching PCI NIC
4 Inline Microfilters
1 Microfilter Wall Plate
1 Splitter
1 Line Swapper (required by some lines for Alcatel equipment)
14-ft 2-wire PHONE cord.
*** UPDATE ***
The standard equipment now provided by Earthlink is as follows:
1 UHP DSL Modem (Only allows one user to access the internet connection at a time, will NOT route despite NAT claims in the setup. Firmware updates as rare as the dodo.)
2 Inline Microfilters (Sturdier and slightly slimmer than the older box-style microfilters)
1 Line Splitter (NOT a filter-splitter [both connectors unfiltered] )
1 5' CAT5 Ethernet cable, straight. (Strange cabling here, since the UHP Modem only allows one user on.)
1 ~5' telephone cord.
Some of the above MAY not be standard. Just after my last contract renewal, two of my filters went out, and a support call went out to Earthlink. They may have packaged my replacement filters with the UHP Modem.
As regards the UHP Modem, this is a poor piece of hardware. The saving grace is that it can be converted to a standard DSL bridge via software. Unfortunately, this will cause firmware upgrades to become completely unavailable until the modem is hard-reset. This will also cause diagnostics to become unavailable without a reset. Of further note is that I specifically requested that they *NOT* send me YET ANOTHER piece of DSL hardware. I currently have a P641, P642, and now this UHP modem. The P641 and P642 are still in working condition, but for some reason obtain a lower speed than the UHP modem, despite syncing at full-speed.
Perhaps Earthlink could offer a better rate if they weren't searching for ways to lower our speeds or hardware quality, not to mention the expense of shipping out hardware that they were specifically told NOT to ship.
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I called up Mindspring (Earthlink) June XX to sign up. The rep. was extremely friendly and gave me notice of all the terms and conditions, but unfortunately didn't tell me about the self-install option. My line was provisioned by BellSouth the next day (partially due to my living next to a BellSouth Switching Station).
*** UPDATE ***
Covad is now servicing my DSL. Bellsouth is still operating my POTS.
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Of note is that I did not at the time have a credit card. Earthlink/Mindspring requires new DSL customers to have a CC for payment. Existing EL/MS customers, however, can pay by check. The rep, upon learning that I did not have a CC, put me on hold and came back a few minutes later with a plan. He signed me up for a Dialup account (30-days free, no setup fee), and had me call back the next day to set up my DSL, since by then I would have an account and could simply switch my plan. This is the first time I've ever had anyone almost literally bend-over-backwards to help me out.
*** UPDATE ***
Earthlink support is spotty. Since the full changeover, Earthlink has fired the majority of its stateside support staff (including a few good friends, and some not-so-good friends.) Stateside technical support is typically spot-on, but the outsourced support (which is obviously Indian - not to blame the Indians for the horrible support, mind, I blame the horrible low-cost training) is hideous. I have not once had a problem resolved BEFORE a transfer to stateside support.
While support is terrible from a technical standpoint, I will say that the call-center personnel, regardless of location, are consistently courteous and seemingly genuinely interested in helping, regardless of ability.
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I waited for approximately a week, and received no equipment or service call. I called up my rep, and was told that BellSouth had provisioned my line earlier, and that my installation should proceed shortly. I waited a few more days to no avail. Meanwhile, I had been invoiced at my dial-up for a $70.00 'Truck Roll,' despite the fact that I was told earlier that there would be no charges for equipment or the install. I called my rep again, and was transferred to DSL support. They explained that the charge for a Truck Roll was for those accounts that needed a service call for installation. I was also told that the charge was waived for the self-install (hence the 'no installation charge,' as noted above). "I'll install it myself."
My equipment arrived *THE NEXT DAY*, and the $70.00 were credited to my bill. This was more my fault than EL/MS's, as I should have requested self-install to begin with.
Setup was no problem, synced on the first try, etc. However, I was having a strange problem. Every 10 minutes or so, I would lose the ability to establish network connections. After a few calls to tech. support (only call them @ 3-4:00 A.M., folks. Then you get a REAL tech.) and a referral to speedguide.net, I tracked the problem to a PPPoE bug/feature/whatever. If you don't manually disable WINS resolution, the software isn't going to do it. This causes the connection to appear to 'die' every 10 minutes or so. It also helps to set a default gateway of 255.255.255.0 for your NIC's TCP/IP binding.
Overall, I've had no problems that couldn't be solved with 5 minutes of work, and in most cases a 'normal' user wouldn't have noticed them. Tweaking has resulted in my obtaining a nearly flat 1.5M downstream (Thanks go to dslreports' excellent diagnostics.)
I would probably recommend BellSouth DSL to a computer newbie, but for anyone running a network or with a measure of experience, Earthlink/Mindspring is the way to go.
*** UPDATE ***
For the past year, Earthlink has regularly dropped my connection at 1800 ET. While sync is typically back within a minute or two, there are no explanations for these outages. I would assume this was due to hardware upgrades and/or 3mbit preparation, but I have seen a DECREASE in my quality of service over the past year. My speeds have gone from a solid 1.5mbit down to roughly 800-900k down. The outages themselves are not a problem, but the QoS issue is.
I have had several multi-hour outages, including one three day outage, with no explanation from Earthlink. This does not include ticketed and scheduled outages, obviously, which are generally expected and accepted.
Given that Bellsouth now offers much greater speeds and a slightly lower price, I cannot recommend Earthlink DSL to anyone. I have had experience on both the consumer end and the corporate end, and the corporate support is some of the worst I have encountered. One company I am working with has already dumped Earthlink Business DSL for Bellsouth's lower pricing and faster speeds.
The few things still keeping me with Earthlink are my many-years-old @mindspring.com email address, and Earthlink's newsgroup access, which improved in the last year to a very high level of quality. Unfortunately, as 6mbit access at much lower prices creeps up on my area, I don't know how much longer I can be expected to stay.
Alas, poor Mindspring! I knew him, DSLReports; a fellow of infinite quality, of most excellent support: he hath borne me on his pairs a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. Here hung those lines that I have passed I know not how oft. Where be your pingtimes now? Your redbacks? Your upstream? Your flashes of downstream, that were wont to set the forum on a roar?
- RvLeshrac
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