"Jim Adney" wrote in message

We all had modem problems at one time. Find out from your telco TS what
is
the distnace from your house to their equipment. Overk 10K feet will not
give you good connection.

Hmmm, do you think they will just tell me this?

If your lucky, they will. At one time it was no hassle. Now the people
working service desks are dumber and dumber. Tell them you're considering
DSL and have to know. Some will tell you yes/no, but insist because you
want to know if the DSL signal will be of good quality.

I know it worked well before, but something has changed. They could have
re-routed the lines, although unlikely.

The first drop in speed occurred when they replaced a broken wire into
my house.

I doubt, that's the reason, but if you remember it happening, then it cold
be.

Changing local service providers over the same POTS will not help. You
will
connect via the same lines and hardware. If you can get phone service
via
cable company, that is a guarantee of 50K conneciton. Been there.

I don't have cable (I figure I watch too much TV already.) Wouldn't a
cable modem give much more than 50k?

Cable modem - YES. I was referring to using the cable company to provide
phone service. They install a small box (strangly called a modem) at your
house and connect your phone lines to it. Your distance to the box becomes
zero - it's in you basemet, so your modem connects at full speed.

Rich