oh crap oh crap oh crap.
It is our sincere regret to inform you that DIRECTV Broadband will discontinue operations. This email shall constitute DIRECTV Broadband's 30 day notice of termination to you. Please be aware that DIRECTV Broadband's network (including your email services) will remain operational for a minimum of 30 days from the date of this notice.so. *breathe* this means i have thirty whole days in which to (a) find a comparable service, one that works with linux, and (b) get them to send me the modem and activate me and stuff within thirty days when there is a major flood of people just like myself trying to all get new service at the same time and ... *breathe* oh god oh god oh god.
i loved my dsl service. loved it. loved the multiple computer support, the way it worked with both operating systems without even having to have software installed. i always felt so close to my DSL service, it was my colleague, my companion, it was always right there with me. and now my friend is going away.
Yes, I saw the news minutes after it was reported on CNET last Friday. I, too, am a soon-to-be-ex-telocity subscriber. You know how all those DSL providers went down in flames awhile back? Well, ours was probably saved by being bought by DirecTV aka Hughes aka General Motors which itself was on the block. Echostar, the competing satellite TV subscription service had put together a deal to buy DirecTV for jillions of $$. But Rupert Murdoch (as channeled by the FCC) didn't like it one bit, and lobbied hard. Ol' Rupe had wanted DirecTV hisself, but was outbid by Echostar (think Michael Jackson vs. Paul McCartney, only much meaner and uglier). So no deal means Echostar had thrown $700M down the crapper, meanwhile DirecTV gets re-orged and vestigal properties like DirecTV DSL get dropped like a hot patootie. I never could understand what DirecTV had to do with DSL. Evidently, they finally agree. Let me know what you find doing research on new providers. And don't expect any last-minit bail-outs a la @Home and AT&T.
Yes, I saw the news minutes after it was reported on CNET last Friday. I, too, am a soon-to-be-ex-telocity subscriber. You know how all those DSL providers went down in flames awhile back? Well, ours was probably saved by being bought by DirecTV aka Hughes aka General Motors which itself was on the block. Echostar, the competing satellite TV subscription service had put together a deal to buy DirecTV for jillions of $$. But Rupert Murdoch (as channeled by the FCC) didn't like it one bit, and lobbied hard. Ol' Rupe had wanted DirecTV hisself, but was outbid by Echostar (think Michael Jackson vs. Paul McCartney, only much meaner and uglier). So no deal means Echostar had thrown $700M down the crapper, meanwhile DirecTV gets re-orged and vestigal properties like DirecTV DSL get dropped like a hot patootie. I never could understand what DirecTV had to do with DSL. Evidently, they finally agree. Let me know what you find doing research on new providers. And don't expect any last-minit bail-outs a la @Home and AT&T.
i have now signed up with dock.net, a local reseller of pac bell dsl. i'm good with that. and i'm spending money locally, which is cool.
I just feel so retro sitting here on my dialup <g>.
i'll try to look at it like that. retro. i'll be retro for a week or so. yeah. that's it.
Gee, Dan, one more thing we have in common. Grins...
dammit I was interested in that DSL service since I live in the *(&(*&^)^% boonies. *sobs*
Wow, I guess they weren't making a profit off the service. Do you have high speed data in your area? That didn't seem so hard to set up with our Windows and Linux machine. Good luck!
good luck!!!!
and thank you for the MT update!
merry christmas.
I am intentionally going to feed your panic so you will not delay on finding a replacement. The broadband market sucks at getting things up and running so find something now and add at least a week to whatever they tell you for fulfillment dates. I'm not kidding. When our former provider closed up on a 30 day notice it took six weeks to get a replacement. You do not want to rely on a dialup account so go! Scoot! Find something! : )
Charter Pipeline--see if there's one in your area. I used them for my internet (and Charter for my cable) in AL, and they didn't suck. Beyond that, I don't know any other companies out here, but I'll keep my fingers crossed for ya.
Best of luck in finding something FAST. Last weekend I didn't have XP drivers to make my new computer work on DSL so I had to find one of those free AOL dial-up discs to go out on the internet to find drivers. It was agonizing waiting for the dial-up to dial and the pages to load. Once you go fast you can never go back.
Try Time Warner if you have them in your area. We have Road Runner Cable. My cousin has had it since the very begiining he did some kind of testing for them and got it free for a while. But it always works good. They even let me run an anomizer program from school that doesn't allow people to trace back pings to my school IP address. Which a lot of ISP's won't allow, but they never give me crap about it. Hope you find something fast. Oh yeah and my cousin Allen says make sure you DONT let them touch any of your computers, YOU set it up on your puters. These ISP people can screw up a system faster than anybody. LOL
I feel your pain, kd. When DSL goes down at the house, the four of us are in a panic.
gee kd, first the job and now this? i'd never be able to cope with the changes! you are such a better woman.
KD,
And since, like me, you're also at the mercy of Pac HELL, don't forget to opt out of their sleezy marketing tactics, er, I mean marketing opportunities.
How? Simply get out a recent bill so you have your 3-digit "customer code" in front of you, go to their opt-out form at http://sbc-pacbell.com/rescpni, and fire away.
This prevents them from sharing such trivial info as where, when and who you call with Pac HELL's marketing affiliates.
Now if I could only "opt out" of unemployment...
My Earthlink DSL has been great with both Winblows and Linux, but I don't think their customer support will support Linux. So if you can't get it set up by yourself, you''re out of luck. I had no problems, though. But do yourself a favor by having a clean Winblows machine as a backup, or do a dual-boot on your Linux box like I did. It's a lot easier in an emergency to switch over on a dual-boot box, than to break out a crap Winblows box out of a storage closet.
DOH and now I see the comment that you signed up with dock.net. My bad. I still think the dual-boot setup is the way to go, though.... Good luck!
i'm going to do it through a linksys router, which i ought to be able to program so that both machines see the internet without much fuss -- i have one windows box and one linux, and they coexist quite peacefully with nothing but the router that came packaged with the telocity service. in fact, neither of them had any telocity software installed, they just saw the internet over the hub with the telocity gateway doing the routing.
sigh. i am going to miss this telocity.
sounds like you've got a good setup planned, then. You'll be OK. It's only 5 days! I went 5 weeks on dialup after being spoiled by 2 years of DSL. Talk about torture!