A couple of weeks after my last DSL outage my line went down again. Same symptoms, loop length change, lots of noise on the line, etc. I went through the trouble-shooting bit with Speakeasy and Covad again, and that ended in Covad wanting to send a tech to my house to check my inside wiring. I'm a patient man, a carpet even, when it comes to things like this. I'm understanding. I work in IT, I know things go wrong. But even I have limits. I hung up the phone and started researching my other options.

In my neighborhood I basically had cable or something else as an alternate to AT&T's copper. Cable would be through Comcast and I really don't like their business practices. Our TV is through DirecTV and that wasn't going to change, so it really didn't make sense to get Comcast's service. I opted for "something else"; wireless.

There are a couple of wireless ISP options in the SF Bay Area, but I picked Unwired Ltd.. The network is run by a small local company whose founder was a poster to BAWUG of which I was an occasional email list participant. That makes Unwired my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate, so you can see where I had to pick them. The dish went up a week ago and so far I'm mostly pleased. Web pages load super fast, latency is lower than DSL (14ms to my office!). The connection is pretty heavily policed though. I've been rsyncing a backup of my personal server in the evenings and the average throughput is around 512Kbps on a 6Mbps synchronous connection. My personal server is on a 10Mbps fractional T3 that was no where near fully subscribed during the rsync, so Unwired must be scaleing back connections regardless of available bandwidth. I'm not using a standard port for ssh on either end, so that might look like P2P traffic. I'll have to send them an email about that. The interesting thing is that my bandwidth wasn't limited to 512Kbps. New connections were fast and not affected by the limit. I wonder if I can apply some of the stuff they have set up to the conference wireless network...