water cooler :: NicRevival?  ADSL for $7.95/month?

The recent increase in Broadband costs is a political issue that is probably not appropriate to discuss here. I could use the private messenger to send interested folks some links to more information, but be aware that I can get rather opinionated and abrasive when discussing politics.

I live in a rural area and up until recently our only choice was SBC, which I tried and failed at; you need to put their crud (and I hear it is REALLY crud) on a windoze PC to set up your account, but more knowledgable folks than myself can clean it up later and still keep the connection.

My own attempt resulted in no DSL and a ruined shared dial-up connection that took me over a year to fix; it's not an experience I would like to repeat.

Earthlink has recently started offering broadband in my area, but I don't like the fact that they seem to keep buying up other dial-up providers and I am also working towards an M$-free household, so I think I'll stick to NicRevival while I've got all these other irons in the fire.

No apologies necessary; this is the freaking WATER COOLER, for pete's sake and it gave me the opportunity to put in another plug for an easy way for us less-than-technically-impressive folks to help out with the kind of DSL that can be downloaded over a dial-up connection.

I think I've been using this service long enough to post  a follow-up.

I've been extremely satisfied. Even out here in the boondocks, I'm always able to connect when I want to and I get a consistant five hours before I get cut off. I have downloaded two 600+MB .isos (on my Slack box with KGet, of course) and numerous audio and video files and have never had to wait to get back on again after my five hour session is up.

The 600+MB files take about a week and a half of being connected in excess of 10 hours a day, so if "unlimited" didn't mean unlimited, I'd know it by now.

More important to me is that as low as the price is, I know that I am contributing my share, however small that may be, to something I believe in. It doesn't bother me that there is no "official" nonprofit status. The other dial-up providers I have looked at for political reasons charge the same rate as MSN and AOHell, which I am becoming increasingly disgusted with and more and more grateful that DSL-the-distro  led me to open my eyes and stop supporting those corporations.

I also like the fact that I can prepay for several months worth of the service and not have to worry about my credit card bill for awhile. You can also pay by check/money order if you cannot or choose not to use credit cards.

As much as I'd love to have  more bandwidth, these considerations are far more important to me. I believe that there are regulations in my country that prevent NIC Revival from offering a similar service for broadband but that there are reasons to be hopeful that this could change.

I may be confused, but I think the $30 a month charge Verizon quoted you is a limited time offer and that the charges would automatically increase after the "special introductory discount" expired; from what I have heard on chit-chat forums and my own experience plugging my DSL box into broadband for five minutes at a LUG meeting and downloading the freshest .iso in 20 minutes at a friend's house, broadband can be more addictive than cocaine and it is very difficult to switch back to dial-up.