DSL/Cable Modem in Twin Cities (Score 1)

I signed up for DSL with Phoenix DSL in the twin Cities during the last week of May... and happily accepted a six-week wait. I spent all of June, July, August and part of September wrangling with them. The way this worked is that US West (now Qwest) owned some of the wiring, Northpoint Communications owned some more of it, and then Phoenix DSL was my "service" (if you can call it that) provider. I was supposed to get iDSL service at 144kbps... Before I gave up in utter frustration, Northpoint had made four appointments to come out and do my wiring, based on being told by Phoenix that that US West had completed the wiring that they had to. Never once was the wiring actually ready for Northpoint to work with. Never once did I get any sympathy from Phoenix DSL, either... and by the time I got fed up around the end of August, Phoenix told me that I had to go into "conflict resolution" that would take at least a MONTH! Yeah, right. I kept repeatedly calling them and badgering them (and copied them on a letter to the Minnesota State's Attorney) and they finally admitted that they weren't going to charge me anything. That very day, I signed up for cable modem service with AT&T Broadband (previously MediaOne). Two weeks later, my cable modem installation was complete and running smoothly at 165 kB/second (you read that right). They even politely changed my MAC address registration at 10:30 at night so I could get my firewall up and running... what a switch. The down side in the Twin Cities is that AT&T broadband is in a fight with the City of Minneapolis over raising rates to cover the cost of the wiring that will be needed to offer cable modem service in Minneapolis itself. But you have no problems in the 'burbs. I would wholeheartedly recommend getting a cable modem over DSL if you live in the Twin Cities, even if as a "technical" solution the DSL is superior to a lot of cable modem installations (i.e. no shared bandwidth, static IP, etc.).