DSL provider which serves customer's hostname on their DNS

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

|  I just subscribed to MediaOne/ATT service and waiting for arrival
|  of a Router to setup our computers.
|
|  However, after reading your comments about MediaOne/ATT I am doubting
|  my choise and thinking of swithing to a:
|
|  	reliable DSL provider which offers
|  	inclusion of customer's hostname on their DNS.
|
|  Your comments on choosing between:
|  	Verizon, EarthLink, RCN, speackeasy, ...
|  Has anyone been happy with any of their current services?

We've had RCN here since early in the year. Mostly it has been pretty
good, but there are a few things that might be worth commenting on.

One is that they are still blocking port 80.  This may be  permanent,
unless  you  pay  a  LOT  more for a commercial site.  I also get the
impression that their commercial web hosting requires  that  you  put
your  web  pages  on  their machines, not on your own, but the things
I've read about this are a bit confusing and I could be wrong.  Their
support people don't seem to understand the question ...

Most of the time the data rate is pretty fast, though  it  does  have
the  usual  cable  problem  of slow speed in the early evening hours,
when you're competing with everyone else in your neighborhood.

The main problem I've seen is that I still have a lot  of  very  slow
connections.  I noticed this first with ssh, which I mentioned here a
month or so back.  But it seems to hit browsers, too, in an irregular
pattern.   The  best  clues  I've found so far are that the hangup is
while the programs are connected to a DNS server.  RCN's servers seem
to be flakey, and fail with a high probability, usually after a delay
on the order of a minute.  I've set  up  my  own  local  caching  DNS
server,  which  helps  a  lot with the browsers, but seems to have no
effect on ssh.  I'm wondering whether there might be some  other  DNS
servers that I should put into resolv.conf before the RCN addresses.

Of course, this might all be due to something configured wrong on  my
machine,  but  I  haven't  found  any  clues about that.  My own test
programs that call gethostbyname() almost always return instantly.