 Review by bathswife 
UPDATED: 2 years ago
member for 7.9 years, 440 visits, last login: 37 days ago
 Birmingham,Jefferson,AL
 $40 per month
 about 5 days
 BellSouth
CLEC party: UUnet
 "Consistent, Reliable and FASTER than local Cable"
 "None"
 "In Birmingham, Bellsouth is the best way to go"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I ordered DSL from Bellsouth in April, got my package and self install kit in less than a week from confirmation and got it set up in a couple of hours. The installation process is very simple, you put a couple of filters on your phone cords, open your pc and put the modem card in, put a cd rom in the drive and let the computer do its stuff.
The modem that came free was an internal dsl and so only good for one pc. I later added a Cayman Router/hub and have my three pc's hooked up. All run smoothly.
I have had no latency problems. The speed is consistent and the connection is reliable. I waited five months to post this review because I know from my previous experience with cable that you can't tell much in the first few days or really even weeks. There has been one outage in this entire five months and that occured yesterday when a fiber optic cable was cut (CALL BEFORE YOU DIG!). I called tech support to find out why my connection was down for the first time in five months and was told what the problem was and that the engineers were hard at work trying to fix the problem.
Download test speeds are consistently around 1200 to 1400 kbps downstream (download speeds) and around 200 kbps upstream.
This is a huge improvement over my @home cable connection that I had for three years. With @home, I was averaging 500-600kbps downstream and about 25kbps upstream.
I had @home cable for three years before DSL was available by Bellsouth in my neighborhood. While cable is reliable and consistent and fast in some areas of the country, in Birmingham, the service is extremely poor, the connection is much slower than DSL and MUCH less reliable. My cable connection with @home was down for 4-8 days of the month and I was always told by tech support that they could get someone out to check it in about THREE weeks.
The bottom line is this: If you live in Birmingham and are considering getting broadband, get Bellsouth's DSL. Whatever you do, don't get @home cable. They apparently are way oversold and with so many users, the speed is slower than DSL and is very unreliable.
UPDATE: Okay, I've now had the Bellsouth adsl for well over a year. I am still very happy with it. We experience consistent speeds and reliable connection, in fact we've never had another connection problem since that first year when someone cut a cable somewhere in the state that shut down the entire system for a few hours. It is always on and it is always fast. A couple of months ago we started experiencing slowness with our connection and I became concerned. I investigated and discovered that my router modem was wearing out, the longer we were on, the slower our connection became. I simply bought a new router. To tell you how great Bellsouth folks were, once I installed my new modem and couldn't get it to run, they came out with several folks on that very day and saw immediately what the problem was and fixed it. Since it was a problem that I myself created, I was a bit embarassed to admit that I had a phone filter on my dsl line (doh!). THey were nice enough to come out, fix things, give me a longer cord ( really needed that!) and then they were off. They are great guys. I hate to sound like a suck up but I have had so many bad experiences with ISPs that I can't overstate how great Bellsouth has been for us. I have gotten several people to sign on with them who were using cable before and these folks all like the bellsouth better than the cable.
UPDATE: December 18, 2003
We are still happy with our Bellsouth ADSL . Reliability has been especially good and our speeds consistent. We are still using a Cayman 3220 H Router Modem and still have the old and original firmware despite my intentions to upgrade for the last year or so. Some hardware owners have had trouble in the past few months and so I would also recomment to new customers they check the Cayman routers available for Bell South, check the Bell South forum for the latest news and if they have any questions, DSL Reports is the place to ask (on forums). Most of my experience with the help desk has been positive though on one occasion I had a grumpy and more alarming, an employee who seemed to understand less about DSL than I do. If you live in Birmingham, especially Hoover, call Bellsouth for DSL, get rid of the cable altogether and get a dish network, it's lots cheaper, picture is clearer and the tv service goes out about as often as our cable did.
I have a dynamic IP. I still haven't researched the reasons for persuing a static IP and so I don't know how it would be different.
I can't imagine giving up my BELLSOUTH ADSL fast access. I have to say that I still love it!
UPDATE: September 1, 2004
Upgraded a couple of months ago to the Extreme DSL and my speeds are consistent at around 2350/300. I am very happy with it. I am a writer and conduct a great deal of research on the internet. I use Mozilla Firefox to browse because I like the tabs. When I am conducting research, I have between 20 to 35 tabbed browser windows open at a time and I can tell a huge difference with the Extreme during those times. My ultra DSL was fine for typical surfing.
I now have a static IP though I am still not clear on how that is beneficial really. I was using a Cayman 3220H router for several years but when I switched to the Extreme DSL service I noticed I would sometimes lose synch for a few seconds at a time during the middle of the night. Since I am usually working at those crazy hours, it was a bother. I opted to get a new router, the Netopia 3346 and haven't experienced any problems since then.
After my last update for the Bellsouth Review, someone wrote, "Why did you wait 3 years?" and I didn't even know people had responded to the review until just now. My answer to that waiting is that I live on top of a mountain with no bellsouth building anywhere nearby. Fortunately BLS was insightful enough to install a remote DSLAMM in my neighborhood, yippity do dah, yippity ay! Uhoh, I'm showing my age.
Bellsouth has recently taken to blocking port 25 so that only their mail servers can be used to send mail from a bellsouth user. For most internet users, that is not a problem. It isn't really a "problem" for me but I did like having the option of using my university mail server once in a while when some earthlink user's spam filter filtered out my legitimate email. Oh well.
All in all, Bellsouth Rules. Someone (many ones actually) have said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." I am very happy with Bellsouth. When I'm travelling and want to check my email or my ebay sales, I can use the backup dialup service.
My current setup is: Netopia 3346 4 port router with 4 pcs connected with a static IP, using PPPoE, Extreme DSL, and seriously considering going wireless.
I have a line monitor on my connection. If you look at it you will see that things have been pretty smooth. Ignore the blank parts...they are only indications that we powered off the setup because of the numerous electric storms this year. Our line is above ground and we had a terrible hit one year. A telco pole right in front of our house got a direct hit by lightning several years ago and fried the mother boards on two brand new PC's, all four internal modems (we were using dial up that day during one of the many CABLE outages), one hard drive, and our upstairs heati/air unit (which was new damnit). Luckily our homeowner's insurance paid for everything after the $500 deductible (the air/heat unit cost much more than that to replace). The new pc's were under warranty and that was before pc makers discovered that they could put a clause in their warranties that excluded power spikes. Anyway, the point is that at the first crack of thunder in the distance, we are very diligent about shutting down our network.
I still love my Bellsouth DSL! And the folks in the Bellsouth forum here on Broadband Reports are always quick to help out if you have a problem.
UPDATE: August 2006...
After all this time I am STILL satisfied with my DSL. It is reliable and fast and on the rare occasions when I've had a problem, the problem was fixed in a reasonable amount of time. I have now been using Bellsouth for a number of years and the service has been extraordinarily better than any of the cable companies I went through (home, TCI, AT&T, etc.). If you live in Birmingham, BELLSOUTH is definitely the right ISP for you.
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