My parents are still on dialup Internet access. Have been for years. Back in the 90s, I got my mother signed up for a free e-mail account on Juno, then Juno started offering relatively cheap dialup TCP/IP, so she signed up for that.
Well, a heck of a lot of things become nigh-well unusable at 56K. Windows, for one: those pesky security updates take for-freaking-ever to load.
So, it's past time to being them into the exciting new world of broadband.
I actually tried to do this several months ago: go to Yahoo's DSL page, and proceed through all the stages of signing up. If I recall correctly, part of the signing-up process was going to involve a call either to or from the land line that was to be used for the DSL... which appeared problematic, given that we were using that line for the dialup access to sign up for the DSL.
I don't remember if that was what blocked our efforts for that day, or if we ran into a step of the process that had an "OUT OF ORDER" sign on it before getting to that point.
Anyway, today I took my travel laptop over there, plugged my cellphone into it - look, Ma, your phone works in the meantime! - and visited dsl.yahoo.com.
Well, Yahoo is still advertising the SBC/Yahoo DSL thing. Except that it notes that SBC is now AT&T. And, if you select AT&T as your existing land-line provider, you're promptly redirected to AT&T's web site (on sbc.com), which says nothing whatsoever about Yahoo.
Well, I didn't really see the need for dragging Yahoo into it anyway. So, punch in the area code and first three digits; get to the right page for the area; punch in the complete phone number (the site not bothering to remember what I'd told it earlier); find the $20/month no-commitment plan (plus $50 for the modem); click "Add to cart"....
Oops. Add-to-cart gets a blank page. As in, contains no HTML whatsoever. Try again: same thing. Does their site not know what to do about Firefox 3.0, so it just returns blankness?
Start over, in Konqueror. Now add-to-cart works. Select the $50 modem, self-install, sundry other questions... confirm this is what we want... click the "Checkout" button...
...and get a page that announces that the site is out of order. Down for maintenance. For your continued comfort and convenience, passengers will remain seated until the lemon-soaked towelettes arrive.
Grrrr....
Well, maybe they'll just have to call up Comcast and get Internet service added to their cable. I've been avoiding that, as Comcast has a horrible reputation for customer service, and the last couple of times cable guys have come out to their place to install stuff, they've gotten it wrong. (And, of course, the shiny new Digital Cable doesn't come with a user manual.)
I'm quite happy with my ISP (Raw Bandwidth Communications), but their low-end DSL is kinda overkill for my parents, and not cheap by today's standards. It's looking suspiciously like the cheap basic household broadband is unobtainable, though.
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