Review by Cyberchondriac 
UPDATED: 9.7 years ago
member for 9.9 years, 2 visits, last login: 9.7 years ago
 Riverside,Burlington,NJ
 $49 per month (month by month)
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Modified March 05, 2000:
Well, it's been a few months now and I have to say that service has actually been pretty stable. No serious outages. My gaming experience is much better with BA DSL than it was with @home cable.
The only remaining thorn is that I can't achieve the download speeds that I should. I max out around 42kB, where I would expect about 60 or so due to the 640kb download rate, and the fact that I'm very close to the CO. I realize overhead takes up some of that, but then again, compression should reclaim some of it too.
Bottom line: so far so, good, Bell's rating is going up a notch, can't wait until they boost the upload speed to 128k!
Dec 1999:
I had a cable modem, but decided to give DSL a shot because of the dedicated
access, and because I was getting severe packet loss with cable modem when
gaming.
The only choice I had was Bellatlantic.net Infospeed. ....Poor me.
I was to get service installed on Dec 2 and 3, over two days, which I had to
take off of work.
On the first day, the tech left leaving my main phone ( the one in the
living room) totally disconnected at the box in my basement.
I tried hooking it back up myself, but didn't get the 'split' analog side,
and it buzzed horribly, and was unusuable until we got another tech out to
termintate it proplerly. Meanwhile, day two, we get the software installed
(I don't like being forced to install yet another browser, but you can't
sign up without it!) but there is no connection. I could authenticate to
the network okay, but not surf, get mail, or anything. No internet. Turns
out a router was down. It was down the next day too; and the day after
that, and so on for an entire week! I checked regularly on the 800 number
for the status.
Finally, they say they have the router fixed, and I go to log on once again,
and now I can't even authenticate, error 629. The phone tech tells me this
is the CO not syncing up, they'll have it fixed soon. Next day, I can now
authenticate again, they say the router is fixed, but I STILL CAN'T CONNECT.
Tech support goes over the same stupid settings in my computer that they do
everytime, and everytime, they find nothing wrong. A manager says they'll
perform diagnostics overnight through my line and give me a call back. The
next day, no call, no message, no email. However, when I go to connect,
finally, after a week and a half, it miraculously works! I'm not blown away
having had a cable modem before, but hey, the games seem smoother... but
hey, what's this??the problems are not over yet.
I have become aware that my connection is breaking about every 5 minutes for
a varying duration of 10 seconds up to a full minute. I freeze up in games,
(and die of course), the newsreader stops working, web pages won't load....
sometimes with error messages if the duration is long enough to cause a
timeout.
The tech who came out to fix my wiring problem took a look and said, "looks
like programming down at the CO. Man, that must be frustrating!"
I made a screenshot of a traceroute to the news server when it was working,
and then a ping to the very first hop when it was in the middle of a
'blackout". The ping times out, no first hop even. I email the screenshots
to Bell, who reply there is nothing wrong, no latency. Um.. my ping to
10.10.1.1 was clearly shown with 4 timeouts, and they claim nothing is
wrong, it's not in their network. Okaaay... Obviously I'm dealing with lab
mice here, not technicians. All in all, the wait times have not been bad,
most of the techs (not all) have been polite, but ineffective. I usually
come away from a tech support call feeling that I know more about networking
than the tech does, which does little to assert my confidence in their
abilities. (I'm a junior admin)
As of this writing, there has been no resolution, no reply from Bell in
days. My advice to anyone is to stay as far away from BA as you can. If you
have other choices, use them. They do not know what they are doing. I
realize not everyone out there is going to have the sentiments that I do,
having not had the experiences I have had, but in conjunction with all the
other complaints I've seen here on this site, I think the warning is
appropriate.
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