Here's the practical side of things (or, how "4-6 weeks" equals "7 weeks"). It is my attempt at documenting my DSL line installation experience which took place between late September and early November of 2000.
The Bottom Line DSL installation is _not_ anywhere near as easy and painless as it should be. More importantly, the companies involved (at least in my situation) all seem to exhibit varying levels of cluelessness. Tip to DSL providers: DON'T SEND HTML EMAIL. Yes I'm shouting. It's annoying to your customers and just shows a total lack of understanding of and disregard for Internet standards.
I spent quite a bit of time looking for DSL providers who offered service for Williamsburg, Virginia. This is more difficult than it might seem at first glance, since it is near impossible to get a single accurate list of ISPs who provide DSL service in a given town. The lists on DSL Reports were somewhat helpful, but often omitted providers who did offer service while including many who did not offer service to my area. This was very frustrating.
My requirements were somewhat interesting--I am not a high-bandwidth user; my desire to have DSL was more a result of a need to be able to run various public services (mail, web, ftp, dns, etc.) than from a desire for a high-bandwidth "pipe." Thus, I needed an ISP who offered routed ethernet, static IP addresses, SDSL service, no PPPoE junk, and terms of service which allow users to run servers. Basically, a simple intermittent high-bandwidth downstream pipe would be useless to me, while a lower-bandwidth connection with good reliability and symmetric speeds would be very useful.
In my case, these requirements led me to Flashcom's 192k SDSL business service. This was more expensive ($99/month) than I had been hoping for, but it satisfied my other requirements. Had speakeasy.net offered service in my area, I probably would have signed up with their ADSL service, which has a good reputation and liberal terms of service for about $50/month. Unfortunately, that was not an option for me.
Here's the timeline:
September 18 -- I called Flashcom to inquire about their residential and business services. I get pricing information and am told that users of residential service are not allowed to run servers and risk having their accounts canceled if they attempt to do so. I asked if this policy were actually enforced and I was never given a good answer. Similarly, I was not given a good answer to my questioning of the reasons for having this policy (which I happened to disagree with). I was sent this email message with references to Flashcom's terms of service on their web site. I was told that installation of either service would take 4-6 weeks to install and that the limiting factor was usually the local telephone monopoly. I told the salesman that I would think about this and call back if I decided to order the service.
September 26 I decided to order the business-grade service. I call Flashcom to place the order and was sent this message to confirm the order.
October 4 I received a curious series of three separate email messages from Covad, the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) whom Flashcom had contracted to install the SDSL line and router. I called Flashcom to ask why they had sent me two messages confirming an installation and one message to cancel the installation. I was told that the order was entered twice in error and one of the entries was canceled.
October 11 Covad sent me this confirmation date for the installation of the "loop" (i.e. the second phone line to be used for DSL).
October 12 Flashcom sent me yet another confirmation of the loop delivery date. Yes, they sent it in HTML, which was beginning to make me wonder about whether Flashcom has any clue whatsoever about what it was doing.
October 18 Covad sent me this discouraging message saying that the loop that was supposedly installed on the 13th was no good. Most likely, the loop was no good because the local phone monopoly (Verizon, formerly known as Bell Titanic^W Atlantic) never bothered to install it....
October 24 Covad sent me another confirmation for a new loop delivery date. I called Flashcom to find out what was going on and (after spending quite a bit of time on hold) was sent this update (in HTML) from Flashcom, which basically said nothing in many words.
October 25 Flashcom set me yet another (HTML) update.
November 1 Covad finally scheduled an appointment! They sent me this message and called me (leaving a message on my answering machine) to confirm the installation appointment. I was finally starting to actually expect that this installation would actually happen as intended...
November 2 I received yet another redundant confirmation from Flashcom (yes, still in HTML) about the installation date.
November 3 Inexplicably, after having received three confirmations of the installation date, I received this puzzling message canceling my appointment. I called Flashcom; their support people were quite clueless and handed my call over to their "escalation team" and promised that I would receive a response by Monday. It never came. Since I was expecting something like this, I also called Covad on 11/3 and was told that the loop was apparently either not installed on 11/1 or was no good and that this was the reason why my appointment had been canceled. (Gee, you'd think that they could have said that in the email message.)
November 6 In the mid-afternoon, the Bell Atlantic lady finally showed up to install the loop, which apparently involved some work at the street and in the basement of my apartment building. Other than the initial "hi, I'm here to install the line" meeting, I never saw her again. I mentioned to her that this work was supposed to have been done last week, and she replied that she was not sure what happened. This perhaps points out a problem that occurs when dealing with CLECs--there is no one to whom to complain when the LEC (local exchange carrier) screws up an order, as no one is willing to take responsibility for problems. On the evening of 11/6, I called Covad to attempt to add my original appointment for 11/7 back to their schedule, which they agreed to do (though the appointment changed from the morning to the afternoon for reasons unknown).
November 7 Finally!!! The installer showed up at about 12:30 and, within about 45 minutes, had wired the phone connection (by using the unused second pair of wires for the SDSL line) to the telephone box in the basement of the apartment and set up the router. Thankfully, he didn't even touch my computer and was not scared that I was running a non-Microsoft, non-MacOS operating system...he just gave me the IP addresses and netmasks and let me set it up as I desired. Almost immediately, I was on the net.
Once the installer left (but not before I insisted that I be given the password to the router!), I spent some time futzing about with the router, and, in about fifteen minutes, set up the necessary port forwarding for telnet, ssh, http, ftp, etc. This was all fairly straightforward not not problematic at all.
The only thing that didn't work right was the "traceroute" utility; "ping" worked fine, but traceroute didn't. It would report the originating and destination hosts, and would count the number of "hops" correctly, but would not report the intermediate hosts. I called Netopia (the router manufacturer) and was told that traceroute was broken on the version of firmware (4.6.2) that was installed on this router. They walked me through the process of upgrading the firmware (gee, I'm glad I had that router password!), which required a reboot of the router when I was done; all went quite well. Just when I was beginning to think that these Netopia folks really knew what they were doing, though, they sent me the requisite HTML email to prove that they weren't as intelligent as they seemed. Oh, well...at least I have DSL service, have avoided dealing with Flashcom as much as possible, and the service appears to be relatively stable.