I feel like I’m finally entering the third act of my DSL upgrade drama. This started over a year ago when I realized that I really wanted faster service then the 768/128 link that I’m paying $80/month for right now. Last June, I asked Verizon to turn up my DSL’s speed, with predictable results–they ran around in circles for over a month, with different departments giving me different answers, ranging from “we already turned it up” to “we lost the order” to “we can’t do that, you need to cancel DSL, wait for it to go dead, and then re-order.”

Amazingly enough, the “you need to cancel” camp was correct–Verizon is unable to increase the speed of my current DSL setup. I played as many cards as I could, pulled the few strings that I have inside of Verizon, had off-the-record conversations with installers, and concluded that I had three choices:

  1. Put up with my current service, as slow and expensive as it it.
  2. Cancel DSL, wait two weeks, and re-order.
  3. Order a second phone line, wait for them to install it, then order DSL on it, then cancel the old line and DSL.

I looked into cable modems, but there’s no way to get a static IP address out of Comcast around here, and I need to run a number of servers. I considered moving my mail, web, and Asterisk servers off onto a hosted system somewhere–that’d let me use Comcast with a dynamic IP, but the cost and complexity of it all just makes it impractical.

So, yesterday, I finally decided to go with plan #3. I ordered a new phone line. It ends up costing me $29 to get it installed and $20/month. Hopefully I won’t have to carry both lines for more then a month. It’s supposed to be up on February 2nd; as soon as that happens, I’m ordering new 1.5/384 DSL service on the line. I’ll cancel the old DSL the same day that the new one comes up–I just need to swing DNS over to the new IP and then wait for a few short timeouts. So, hopefully, this whole saga won’t cost me more then $100 up front. The nice thing is that it’ll end up saving me a few bucks in the long term–with 3x the upstream bandwidth, I can move more phone services over to VoIP, so I can turn off more features on the phone line. That could save me almost $10/month. It’s not a lot of money, but every bit helps sometimes. Besides, it’s mostly the principle of the thing.