I have no illusions about Verizon DSL - I've heard friends complaints, and read plenty of others. On the other hand, after the last couple of weeks of Comcast flakiness, I think some local competition would have to help. Last week's outage looked an awful lot like a large scale DNS attack (Comcast has not said anything to that effect). Things were flaky last night in exactly the same way, which started me thinking that the earlier outage may have been less harm and more foul. Now there's an outage just in my node. Sigh.