This is a rant because this started as an issue that has been going on for a long time....

Ever since moving to our new house, I've been plagued with fairly frequent outages from my cable modem. Since I work from home, no cable modem means not being able to work. And mind you, I am paying extra for Business level support for my cable modem.

Finally, last week after calling in about my latest cable modem issues, Comcast discovered, among other things, that I've been getting residential level service and not commercial/business level service ever since I moved. This in addition to yet another line problem that caused my service to basically be on the blink for over a week. We are still discussing how many months of service they are going to start crediting me for (they want to credit me for 2 - I am holding out for 4 after this latest discovery). But that's a different story....

I decided that since these outages seem to happen at least every other month for prolonged periods, it's time to give the local Mega-Telco a chance. I ordered up some residential DSL service on Wednesday. I'm impressed that Verizon had everything I needed to my door and provisioned by Friday evening. This evening, I took everything out of the box and hooked it up and had it running in no time. The only annoyance was having to install line filters on all the phones utilizing the second line in the house...

I'm actually fairly impressed with things. The hookup was completely easy, and a brief bit of Googling got me the information I needed to tie in my Linksys WRT54G wireless router into the DSL network. Home networking now consists of the fast-but-fragile Comcast 12Mbps/768kbps on the main network line and one wireless network, and Verizon 3Mbps/768kbps on the second wireless network.

I'll have to investigate some of the SOHO devices that allow for dual WAN connections to see if I can get true redundant networking, but hey, this is a start. Go ahead Comcast - I'm ready for your next line oopsie...and you'd better watch out because I hear FIOS is just 4 months away in my neighborhood...