Living in Westminster, I thought I have to live with Verizon DSL for the rest of my life, and put up with their variable speed, sloppy billing and outrageous wait time to correct their errors, It has been 3 months, and it is still not corrected. Then I found Quantum internet. For the longest time I thought they only do dial-ups, however, they do have other real services such as a real DSL(dry loop), voice, T1, etc. I ordered the 6MDSL dry loop(no phone service). After a day of use I do notice some significant improvement over the Verizon service. 1) Tier 1 backbone, looks like my service is served by Quest/Century link. This saved 2 hops to get to Yahoo(11 vs 13), and average round trip goes from 480ms to 47ms. That is impressive. 2) Dealing with local people. From the sales people, to the technicians, they are all not far away, very friendly and easy to deal with. 3) speed test reveals, I do get the 6M advertised speed regardless of where the servers are, 147 miles away or 2500 mile away. looks like the speed is capped by the local switch. 3) higher speed is available. since I am less than a mile away from their the COLO, my speed can get up to 19M, although they don’t offer any service over 9M. I am sure if you pay them enough, and talked to the nice people in the office, they can do it if they wanted to. So bottom line, usually it cost MORE to shop at your local merchant, but in this case, the cost and service way exceed their giant competitor.