If you have ever had to suffer through an encounter with a front-line support person for any broadband provider, you will appreciate these twin entries from Gizmodo:
Lies Verizon DSL Support Has Told Me Today: “Phone lines over 14 feet will, over time, fry your modem.”
Lies I Have Told Verizon DSL Support Today: “I have completed all your tests as you requested, including rewiring my house.”
Heh.
Ed Bott 
Got to say I pity you guys over the other side of the pond. We have dreadful broadband providers here in the UK too, but also some excellent quality ones who can give you service wherever BT have done the exchange conversion. My favourite is Andrews & Arnold (www.aaisp.net.uk) where you can get to a knowledgeable tech in a couple of minutes and who will give you fixed public IP addresses as part of the package. And no, I’m not getting paid for this, just a satisfied customer.
Cheers,
Ian
There are good broadband providers here too. I am nothing but happy with Ygnition, who actually take the time to call and let me know if there’s an outage.
You guys are lucky to have a service at all. In South Africa we have a monopoloy, Telkom – 39% state owned, but listed on the NYSE. It takes a minimum of 21 working days to connect you when you already have the copper wire – at least 3 months if you don’t. The service is not guaranteed, capped at 3GBpm, and is 400% more expensive than the US, Europe and UK. Telkom staff are not allowed to divulge when your service may be delivered – it is a dismissable offence. If you are trying to run or start a business, well tough. They have been laying off staff – a legacy of US and Korean partners. Stripped the costs (staff) out so can’t deliver any kind of service. I’ll take what you guys get anytime…sigh
I could myself lucky. In the US, I have a provider who had one of the worst reputations in the business (Charter), but I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them despite the occasional outage. My biggest gripe is that they limit newsgroup download speeds to 128k, but unlike other US cable companies, Charter does not limit how many Gb you can download in a month.
We once spent several days over the course of a few days with Verizon help desk online. Every 15 minutes they would shuffle us to a new help desk person. They never did resolve the problem. I had to bring it to a friend at work who wiped our system and told us not to use the Verizon MSN page again and to only use IE.