In a message dated 7/9/2006 3:36:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes: Verizon service and quality still suck in Texas. It's as slow (or slower) than dial-up 25% of the time. And they have you go through all these silly rituals when you call up to complain about the service. Unplug this and that and wait for 5 minutes, et.al... Never works and I finally gave up. I'm thinking of going with cable internet service. Phillip ************************ I've had exactly the same experience with Roadrunner, so switching to cable may not help. Once the billing starts, their only incentive is to minimize the cost of service. Now I'm using dialup and podcasting. Online 24 hours a day on a dedicated line with podcast software, I can download more audio and some video than I can review. Podcasting has increased the amount of audio and video content produced daily by at least an order of magnitude. I'm even considering starting my own podcast. However it would be like adding water to the ocean. Archiving it all seems impossible. What fragments of it will survive to form the future's picture of us? Mike Csontos