Sold down the river For various reasons I've been a GTE (now Verizon) Americast (cable) customer almost from their start here in Thousand Oaks. As soon as it was available, we added cable modem service. The GTE broadband service has had some serious gowning pains over the years, but until a couple years ago it was the only game in town and the price was still right ($40) even with all the port blocking changes a couple years back.
Our relationship with the company is now over. Verizon wanted to dump the very small cable network and they finally found a buyer in Adelphia. So despite avoiding Adelphia like the plague (Adelphia had bought out TCI, who had bought the original small company called Ventura County Cable), now I'm stuck for basic cable service. Worse, my data services were also sold, which isn't going to fly at all.
On March 1, we got a notice from Verizon that effective February 28, they were no longer providing our service (nice timely notice eh?) During the week, we got the letter. No more static DSL, plus a few other inconvenient little details (a lot people use their ISP provided email addresses, now they need new mailboxes because gte.net did not transfer over). This week we're supposed to convert from static IP to DHCP. A friend put the letter this way...
The letter basically spells out that you are screwed, and then tells you to read the other side for instructions on how to perform the procedure on yourself.
So I've been looking for DSL providers in my limited spare time and I have found a couple who can deliver static IP, 1.5mb down and better than 128kb up. I've put in the initial paperwork and we'll see what develops. In the meantime, I'll have to deal with DHCP, which is really unpleasant (I'm going to have to constantly fiddle with IP filters at work).
1:43:52 PM 
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