Who is your voice and data provider, and do you recommend them?

[politicat]

Comcast and I are about to part ways because as far as I can tell, they're incompetent.

However, Qwest was worse. (We have not had a land line for more than 4 years.)

Are there any other options, or do I have to go get a Quest land line to transfer service to someone else to get DSL?

[longship]

1. Why a Local ISP.

My ISP is a *local* one, not a national one. The reason this is good is that they do not have account restrictions of the nationals. I run Linux and several servers on my account. I have a static IP address. If I were connected through a national ISP I would have to pay much, much more for a commercial account. My local ISP does not care what I do with my bandwidth, so this saves me big bucks.

You might ask: Why should a normal user care about this?

What it means for the normal Net user is service. It means better service because I can literally drop over to the ISP and get things straightened out. It also means that they answer the phone and I'm talking to somebody who can fix things.

My ISP is Keyway Internet Services which serves much of Southern California. They are absolutely wonderful.

I have Verizon Gold DSL contracted through Keyway. My land line is also Verizon. (I have no choice here however Verizon has been very, very good.)

[politicat]

2. Thanks, but I need local information.

Colorado local, not California local.

We don't have verizon. As far as I can tell, my choices are rather limited. That's why I want feedback.

[longship]

3. Well, look for a local ISP.

You'll likely get better service at competitive prices.

That was the point of my post.

[Hawkeye-X]

4. You can try..

Dimensional Communications, but the problem is that all of the telephone line is Qwest owned, so you're screwed either way.

Comcast is no better, but at least it works for me.

[politicat]

5. That's false.

Qwest does not own the lines. We do, as taxpayers. We paid for them, we put them in, we own them.

All Qwest does is holds the contract to maintain them. That is why it is illegal for them to stall another service provider on the "last mile" thing. (And incidentally, why I despise them so much.)

Comcast has screwed us: I've overpaid my bill every month for the last 18. (not a problem, a nice credit is a lovely thing to behold.) I'm a good customer, always on time, always in full. When we moved, they charged us a $53 account move fee, upped our rate from $52 a month to $79.95 a month, and the installer trashed my office and didn't clean up after himself. They claimed the rate increase was because I'm a new customer (so why didn't I get the 19.95 special they're advertising???) and refused to waive the account move fee.

They won't treat their standing customers well, they lose them. Period. It costs nothing to maintain a customer. It costs a lot to get one. That's business school 101 customer relations.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. I switched to Comcast a few months ago and am happy with them

They're an improvement over Champion Broadband, which I was using for TV and Internet. I've had Comcast for telephone service for years.

"Happy" = "not constantly unhappy" Maybe that's the best one can hope for.