[svlug] Sprint Broadband Considered Harmful Was: DSL Considered Harmful

[Greg Steele]

I'd stay the heck away from Sprint's broadband service.
I'm have their (non) service, and the performance is
really horrible in the evenings.  You might be able to
get 1.5mbps early in the morning, but at night I barely
average ISDN speed, and a couple of nights it was so bad
I gave up and turned on the modem.
The service is VERY bursty, and I've seen ping times to my
work machines of up to 40 SECONDS.  Doing anything interactive,
like running vi, over this link is just too painful.
They also seem to have a major problem with packet loss.
A week or so ago the packet loss was running 20-50%, though it
was down around 10% last night.
Also, the techs I've talked to don't know squat about Linux,
and when I talk to support they try to blame my problems
on my hardware/OS, which doesn't seem to have any problems
talking to the other computers in the house.

I think they seriously oversold the service, and their existing
hardware can't handle it.

I am a very unhappy Sprint Broadband customer.

Greg
 

> 
> 
> >=20
> > I am a very, very unhappy DSL customer.
> 

<much deleted>
Karsten said:

> The other side is that the telcoms may just succeed in poisoning the
> waters to the extent that nobody wants to play anymore.  I'm getting
> pings from my Sprint, my long distance provider [2], for wireless
> broadband, up to 1.5 mbps down, 128 up.  Stories of informal wireless
> networks springing up in populated areas (yesterday's Slashdot story of
> the Greenwich Village net in NYC) are more common.  DSL's not the only
> game in town, and if the telco's keep pinching it, the alternatives will
> become more attractive and developed.
>