with the evolving competition, a lot of the companies now offer wireless routers with their services when they get new clients.

I am with you, River to BUY your own router. For one, you'll pay so much more per/month usually for their router (but they usually give you an option to buy their router).

I don't like buying routers offered by the companies because they are usually subpar and actually cost more.

there are a lot of refurbished ones one can pick up cheap from buy.com or amazon.com

verizon is on top with their fiber optics connection (the fastest) and cable is consider second fastest while DSL is consider the slowest.

at current time, DSL runs at 3 meg while cable offers up to 10megs with FiOp offers up to 50 megs (depending on what you want to pay for, they usually have like a 3meg package, 5 meg package, 10 meg and so on and so forth)

so your DSL should be 1-3meg standard, however, your own computer and connection will have to be fast itself to utilize the whole 3 megs (doesn't happen for most of us unless you have allentgamer's computer. LOL) (a good example would be say your computer has high mghrtz processor and you use a cat6 ethernet cord vs. a slower processor and a cat5 ethernet cord)

my guess is your bit/rate conversion will be pretty fast as far as checking out pages but whenever you have to download videos, it'll probably clock slower (probably around 15-80kpb/sec)

if you have a workhorse puter it might give you a faster bit/transfer rate (like the Dell XPS puters)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

as far as wireless routers go, don't go anything below G band.

it goes B, G, then N band with N being the fastest.

the laptop's wireless network card is usually a G band and it is more secure.

but if you want to stay a step ahead, go ahead and get a N band router, they are on sale all over the place and they are backwards compatible. You just have to tweak it a bit by going to the router's site (either linksys or Netgear)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DSL doesn't need landline but they prefer it (they'll charge you a little bit for not hooking up to your landline and you can try to haggle with them about it like we did, it was a stupid $2.87/per month for us if we didn't hook it up to a landline and I argued [very nicely] about it and they took three months off and I plan on bugging them again. LOL)

vonage can use DSL but it MIGHT require you to hook it up to a landline (it doesn't have to be activated, I don't think but I'd call them to make sure)

http://www.vonage.com/help_vonage.ph...PR0706010001W1

they also let you check your speed before you hook up to see how good your connection will be.

We use vonage and we like it thus far.