Hmmmm... interesting.
You know, I doubt that that tech support person thought that she really knew much at all -- would explain why she was upset with someone "getting ahead of her." It throws of her scripted routine.
Anyhow, I just moved and can't get DSL at my place, so I ended up with Comcast cable internet -- not as bad as I thought. I'll still keep checking on DSL, but this works for now.
At my old place, I was using DirectTVDSL (formerly Telocity), which gave pretty nice service. For $49, they give everyone 384K/128K minimums and all users get a static IP (at least when I signed up, that was the rule).
On my end, I run an old 486/66 box with LEAF booted from a Compact Flash card. It also works quite nicely and can do just about anything I want to find/create and install a package to do. At one point (back in CA), I had my firewall/router also serving as a primary DNS for my domains. If you're so inclined, you can check it out at
leaf.sourceforge.net. I am using the "bering" distrobution, which is based on kernel 2.4.x and has ip tables for firewalling rules. It also contains a damn cool mini-web server (accessable from INSIDE only) that allows you to check the firewall status.