I really appreciate all the responses so far - I had a long talk with a phone company sales rep the other day and he made the whole thing sound so easy and inexpensive that I now do not believe a word he told me! Am I paranoid, or are some of these things suspicious? He assures me I will not have to change my ISP when I sign up for DSL. He says the modem is free, no installation fee, no hardware needs to be put inside my machine. He says the disk that comes with it has software both for Windows and for Linux systems. He says I can puyt it on my one and only line (although I presently have two) and use it without affecting incoming or outgoing voice calls. I understand about bandwidth sharing - the economics and time-of-day distribution problem, but hell, I have that problem even now occasionally, although my ISP has greatly improved its throughput in the last year or so. The system supervisor at my ISP is a Linux freak too (woops! enthusiast) although the tech support staff is not. He monitors their email traffic, so when I ask a question of them he has often intercepted my queries himself - he says he "looks forward" to my email. Well hell, I look forward to his too. I have not yet talked to my ISP about it, because I expect they will badmouth DSL in view of their promotional stuff right now. The phone company had nothing to say about cable at all. The monthly cost for me with DSL would be about twice what I am presently paying for my second line, which is easily within my budget. I am leaning toward DSL. Thanks again - Chuck Visit me at http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh (Yahoo ID: hallenbeck2002) The Moon is Waning Crescent (44% of Full)
