TFBnet ADSL vs. SBC / Yahoo ADSL

SBC’s partnership with Yahoo and their combined low-cost ADSL Internet offerings have really made an impact on the DSL marketplace. We are often asked how we can compete with their pricing and the backing of their two large companies. We can and we do compete with them, not on price, but on what we offer in features, service and support. There are two timeless sayings that come to mind when comparing TFBnet’s ADSL service to SBC / Yahoo’s. “You Get What You Pay For” and “Caveat Emptor” (Buyer Beware).

Features	SBC	TFBnet
100% Faster Upload Speeds	ADSL up to 384K / 128K ADSL 384 to 1.5M / 128K ADSL 768K to 1.5M / 256K ADSL 384K / 384K ADSL 1.5M to 6.0M / 384K	ADSL up to 384K / 128 to 256K ADSL up to 1.5M / 128K to 256K ADSL 768K to 1.5M / 256K to 384K ADSL 384K to 416K / 384K to 416K ADSL 1.5M to 6M / 384K to 608K
Term Commitment	One-year contract. 50% price increase after one year. $200 early termination penalty.	No term contract. Service is month to month. Cancel at any time without termination penalty. Terms and restrictions apply. See below for details.
Type of Connection	PPPoe connection. "Dial-Up DSL" requires reconnection to Internet service. Timeout disconnects.	Industry standare PPP connection. Connected to Internet 24/7. Ready to go anytime you are.
IP Addresses	Dynamic, always changing. Cannot host services. Problems with remote telecommuting software like PCAnywhere and VPN. Static IP address available at considerable extra cost.	Static, never changes. 1 static IP address included for residential service. 2 - 5 static IP addresses included for business service. Additional static IP addresses available at nominal cost.
Software	"Dial-Up DSL" software required. Yahoo interface and email system. Pop-Up ads.	Uses the software already on your computer. Your choice of web browser, email program and other Internet software.

Features: 100% Faster Upload Speeds
Speeds for DSL services are typically listed in the format of download / upload. As you can see in the comparison chart above, TFBnet offers up to 100% faster upload speeds than SBC / Yahoo. This is the first clue that TFBnet has a higher-quality service than SBC / Yahoo.

Features: Term Commitments
SBC / Yahoo requires a one-year contract to receive their lowest monthly pricing. When the year is up, the monthly charge will increase by almost 50%. When a current TFBnet customer asked an SBC / Yahoo rep about this recently, he was informed that you can just cancel the service at the end of the contract and sign up again. What he didn't tell our customer was that he would be without Internet service for at least two weeks, because you can only have one ADSL service on a phone line at a time. It takes one week for the existing (old) service to cancel and another week for the new service to come on-line.

If you need to cancel the service before the contract expires, you will be charged a $200 early termination fee. What happens if you are not happy with the SBC / Yahoo service (more on why that might be, see below)? You are stuck with the service for the next twelve months or are $200 poorer.

TFBnet has no term commitments for ADSL service in our primary service area. No term commitment means no early termination fees. You pay for TFBnet ADSL month-to-month and are free to cancel whenever you like. Outside of our primary ADSL service area, we are obligated to require a twelve-month term commitment, including an early termination fee equal to the time remaining on the contract.

Features: Type of Connection
SBC / Yahoo utilizes a “PPPoe Connection” which is a fancy term for Dial-Up DSL. There are several advantages to this type of connection, all to SBC / Yahoo’s benefit. You use their dial-up software to connect to the DSL service. If your Internet activity is not constant the connection will be dropped, losing any Internet work-in-progress, forcing you to dial up again and start over. If too many customers are using the SBC / Yahoo service at one time (overloading their Internet bandwidth), the PPPoe connection scheme allows them to “inadvertantly” (oops, sorry) drop your connection.

TFBnet utilizes the industry standard “PPP Connection”. It does not require any software other than that which is part of your operating system. Your DSL connection is automatic and online 24/7. We closely monitor our Internet bandwidth allocation to ensure that it is never overloaded. When our Internet bandwidth begins to “fill up”, we increase the bandwidth to accommodate our growing customer base.

Features: IP Addresses
SBC / Yahoo provides a dynamic (always changing) IP address with their ADSL service. Every time you dial in and connect to their service, your IP address changes. This is not a real problem for residential customers, but can be very important to business customers. A constant (static) IP address is necessary for hosting services on your DSL circuit. Remote telecommuting applications like PCAnywhere or Virtual Private Networking require a static IP address. If you were thinking of getting SBC / Yahoo’s business-class service, think twice and check their pricing schedule. SBC / Yahoo will provide a static IP address for both home and business customers – for a whopping $250 extra installation charge.

TFBnet provides one static IP address for all residential customers and two to five static IP addresses for all business customers. These static IP addresses are included as part of our normal DSL service. Additional static IP addresses are available for the paltry monthly fee of $5 to $7.50 with a $5 to $7.50 installation charge.

Features: Internet Software
SBC / Yahoo ships their ADSL installation kit with the software necessary to connect to their service. This includes the dial-up DSL connectivity software and the Yahoo interface / email system. The Yahoo system includes such wonderful features as pop-up advertising. Ever wonder why Yahoo co-brands the service? Now you do. In all fairness, you can “uninstall” the Yahoo system, but anyone who has had AOL and tried to “uninstall” that will understand what a nightmare that could be.

TFBnet provides absolutely none, nada, zip software with its DSL service. Why? Because everything you need is already included in your computer’s operating system. You are free to use whatever Internet browser or email system that you are comfortable with.

Service and Support
With the resources and sheer size of SBC and Yahoo, you would think that their service and support would be beyond compare. Rather than state our admittedly biased opinion, we would like to share the composite comments of recent SBC / Yahoo converts who contacted us after signing up with SBC / Yahoo:

“I called TFBnet’s customer service department and was impressed with the assistance I was given. They spent the time to explain my DSL options and even pre-qualified the services for my location. I explained that I was also considering SBC / Yahoo because their service was a few dollars cheaper. TFBnet explained the differences between their service and SBC / Yahoo’s service, but I went with SBC / Yahoo to save those few dollars.”

“The only good thing I can say about my experience with SBC / Yahoo is that the self-install modem kit arrived when expected. Installing the modem and SBC / Yahoo software was not as easy as I was led to believe. Six phone calls and two days later, I was finally connected to the Internet. I was initially impressed with the speed difference over my old dial-up modem, but that quickly gave way to frustration.”

“The SBC / Yahoo email system was very slow. It would sometimes take hours for email messages to arrive in my inbox. I wasn’t very happy having Yahoo as my primary home page and the pop-up ads were driving me crazy. To top it all off, my connection to SBC / Yahoo would drop whenever I left my computer for a little while. It even dropped sometimes while I was in the middle of browsing the Internet. I contacted SBC / Yahoo technical support, but again it took hours to days to address my complaints. I did manage to uninstall the Yahoo software, but now my computer locks up sometimes and just doesn’t work as well as it used to. But my biggest complaint is now I’m stuck with SBC / Yahoo for the next year! I really wish I would have listened to TFBnet when I was shopping around for DSL service. You can bet I will when I switch to them after my SBC / Yahoo contract is up!”

Although TFBnet may be a small company when compared to SBC and Yahoo, our smaller size allows us to react quickly and maintain high standards of service and support. Our customer service department is well versed in the types of Internet services we provide and how those services can be best utilized by our customers. We offer a broad array of DSL services from a variety of vendors (yes, including SBC), but we owe allegiance to no one except our customers. If a particular vendor’s product does not live up to our standards for features and performance, we do not offer it to our customers. Period.

Our technical support department is staffed by knowledgeable and helpful technicians. Job #1 for our tech support staff is solving our customer’s problems, no matter how large or small they may be. They provide solutions not only for Internet problems, but also go to great lengths to suggest overall computer solutions and ways for customers to get the most out of the Internet and their computer systems. We even offer a carry-in computer service that offers troubleshooting, repairs, upgrades, overhauls and tune-ups (for TFBnet and non-TFBnet customers alike).

Our tech support department is backed-up by two other assets that you will not always find with every Internet Service Provider – our Information Technology department and our sister company Data Management Systems. Our IT department monitors our operations around the clock to ensure that everything is working at its peak performance. The IT department is also responsible for implementing the latest in Internet and connectivity technologies.

Data Management Systems (760-728-0984) is our ace in the hole. Recently celebrating its 20^th anniversary, DMS provides computer, network and software sales, on-site service and repairs, installation, on-going support and (ta-da) works hand-in-glove with TFBnet to design and implement Internet solutions for the business environment.

Buyer Aware
Although the preceding may have been a wee bit tongue-in-check, do not think for a minute that TFBnet isn’t serious about providing the best Internet services, backed up by top-notch customer and technical support. Yes, we do cost a bit more than some of our competitors, but we offer a level of features, service and support that those competitors have chosen not to.

If you are currently a TFBnet customer, whether with dial-up, DSL, T1 or any of the myriad of other services we provide, please keep us in mind when considering enhancing your Internet capabilities. If you are considering becoming a TFBnet customer, please contact our customer service department (888-211-1674) to learn more about our full array of Internet services, including the features that set us apart from the rest.