said by LazMan:if your ISP has a failure, you'd be good with the secondary login, but if it's loss of sync or physical problem, you're still boned.
Out of the dozen or so times where I had service disruptions on DSL, there was only one time where it was due to the phone line/DSLAM themselves. All other times were TSI-specific issues between Bell's BAS and TSI's servers/routers.
So for the types of failures I have personally witnessed, a secondary login from a different ISP would have solved my problem 90-95% of the time; the bulk of which being authentication issues.
Once the hard-line is up and working properly, it rarely fails. I recently had a Bell tech visit to setup DSL at my new address and the visit took nearly two hours - turned out the first DSLAM port he tried had an unmapped failure: only 12dB SNRM and unable to hold sync at any speed for more than a minute even with both my ST516 and Bell's own modem. One port switch later and my old ST516 is up at 8.5Mbps and 27dB SNRM; should be clear-sailing from there - at least until the next bout of authentication failures.
