My ISP is South. California SBC DSL. During 4pm pst - 1 am pst, I have not been able to stay in game for more than 10 min in the last 10 days. If you are considering switching to SBC DSL, you have been warned.

Here is a thread containing the screaming and moaning from other SBC customers like me. It's 17 pages long and growing.
www.dslreports.com/forum/...at;start=0 (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,7750703~root=ilec,pcb~mode=flat;start=0)

For myself, the fact is:
During 4pm pst to 1am pst in the last 10 days,
(1) pinging my first hop is 75ms instead of the normal 15ms, that's 5 times slower
(2) upload speed is 5 - 30 kbps instead of the normal 128 kbps, that's less than half the speed of a 56k modem
(3) Intermittent connectivity: I have never been able to stay in EQ for more than 10 min.

Sigh.... I am using Earthlink dial up now.

I happened to notice lots and lots of dropped packets to the SOE site as well, but I'm using Cox Cable for my service. Maybe it is an hop on the way?

A lot of routers will prioritize ICMP packets (timeout replies?) to be low priority so look at the total trip time rather than the time at a single hop. If you're directly pinging your first hop router you might get a huge response time which doesn't really exist if you ping a destination.

Ugh... SBC sounds bad. I hated Pacific Bell so I dropped them like a rock when Cox offered phone service and internet.

Also, I have a nice tool called Ping Plotter that is pretty cool for evaluating your connection.

I've been using SBC DSL (formerly Pacific Bell DSL) for the past 5 years, about the time they started rolling out the service. My connection to EQ's servers has always been excellent all-around, and I get about 5Mbit/sec actual download and 350 Kbit/sec [edit] upload. Ping time to EQ's servers is 30-80ms depending on the time of day.

Some time ago, for a period of a few months, SBC would do maintenance at 3:30 A.M. which would drop the connection for a couple of minutes (very annoying for trader mode), but they have stopped. In the past few weeks I have noticed very brief bursts of large packet loss every hour or so, but I have not gotten disconnected, and it seems to be something specific to EQ as I have no problems with other sites.

Compared to the other DSL/cable disasters I've been party or witness to (including Earthlink, which was just about the worst service ever), SBC DSL has been outstanding.

Agree, SBC has been great for me. I had sbc dsl a few years back and never had any problems. The connection was stable and fast.

Then I moved and sbc didn't have dsl in my area so I had to go with comcast. The connection there blew. Constant disconnects starting on thurs night and going through late Monday morning. I couldn't stay in game on the weekends to save my life. I finally got them to come out and see what was going on and they found that the original installation was set up off a split of someone else's line. They couldn't fix it so they said and just upped the signal a bit, but it still didn't help much. I got a lot of discounts during my time there....

Now I'm back on sbc dsl and it's heaven. No disconnects at all.

I had DSL when I lived in San Diego. It was still Pac Bell and/or SBC Pac Bell then.

I rarely got disconnected...but, commonly had download speeds of 1Kb(yes that's a small b). Some of it can have to do with the lines in your area, but there is no way they can convince me that is it. Even if that was the problem, I had them for over 1 year and never saw an improvment, so even if it was the lines...after 1 year it's them not replacing the lines.

It's all about the money. I've heard of people gettings DSL now being more than 5 miles from a point(they said at first you had to be within 2 miles). If you are far away, and don't spend the bucks on an actual DSL line (DSL is SUPPOSED to stand for DIGITAL subscriber line. Not trying to overload the current old analog phone lines with as much crap as possible to try to squeeze a few more pennies out of a customer base that has been ripped off for years and years), I wouldn't expect much.

Read your SLAs. If they legitimatly are not meeting them, then you have actual legal ground to stand on. Most companies will crumble when you bring up SLAs, but SBC is soo big now, who knows. They split up the whole Bell company whenever that was for a reason, and now SBC has managed to go around and buy several of them up.

I guess people are too busy complaining about Microsoft to worry about something as silly as their phone company.

<blockquote>gamilenka says:<hr>I rarely got disconnected...but, commonly had download speeds of 1Kb(yes that's a small b). Some of it can have to do with the lines in your area, but there is no way they can convince me that is it.[/quote]With DSL, your maximum transfer rate depends on your distance to the CO, no matter what provider you choose. This is good if you're in an urban area and bad if you're not. Speeds are usually quotes as "up to X", but you don't get X unless you are really close to the CO, maybe 1 mile maximum. All DSL companies will also quote you a minimum guaranteed speed, and if you don't get that, you have a right to complain. For example, the cheapest SBC package is 128 Kb upload, 384 Kb to 1.5 Mbps download, and a more expensive one is 384 Kb upload, 1.5 Mbps - 6.0 Mbps download.