I’m sure that you all have heard the news that SBC is offering DSL service for $14.95/month. Of course, you still need to have a phone line which costs a minimum of around $6/month. But whatever, $21/month is a pretty sweet price for broadband. In addition, SBC has a “professional” package that offers 1.5-3.0 Mbs for $24.99/month, but with the required phone line it’s more like $31/month. You can view the SBC rate plans “here”:1.

However, the sweetness stops as soon as you call SBC to order DSL. Since I am moving, I don’t have the required phone line that they force you to “bundle” with DSL. In fact, you can’t even order DSL _until_ you have the phone line. Ugh!

So I go through the hassle of signing up for a phone line with the absolute minimum of service, only to find out that the phone line won’t be active for another 5 days. Jeez, so it’s going to be 5 days without broadband before I can even _order_ broadband. That $31/month for the pro service is starting to not feel like such a bargain.

But it gets better. Two days after I ordered the phone line, I get a call from SBC saying they need me to fax a picture ID to them in order to install the phone line. It turns out that even if I could fax them the ID (I can’t do it today since I am busy moving and can’t get down to Kinkos to use a fax machine), they have delayed installing the phone line. The timer has been reset, so it’s another 5 days from today at best (for a total of 7 since I placed the order) that the phone line would become active. *Then* I can place the order for DSL.

OMG! And once I get the phone line, I have to go back and order DSL. Once you do that, it takes SBC something like another 5 days to ship the modem to you. Add all of this up, and it’s gonna take two weeks to get broadband from SBC.

Fuck that. I called up Comcast, and in about two minutes with no faxing of picture IDs, I’m having broadband installed the day after tomorrow.

Guess who just won the DSL vs. Cable war at my new pad?

[1(SBC DSL rate plans)]http://www02.sbc.com/DSL_new/content_new/1,,18,00.html