Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

Through our own networks and products, partnerships, and agreements, EarthLink looks to provide as many choices as possible to get internet and voice services to you the way you want them. If you look at what we offer throughout the country, it's a pretty diverse menu including standard DSL, accelerated dial-up, several different types of voice over IP, cable, satellite, DSL2, and Wi-Fi at home and throughout select cities. And as always there are more forms in the works via our next-gen broadband team. Today we announced that in Verizon territories in many of the states we service, we can now offer "freestanding DSL," or the ability to get our DSL service alone, without having to also pay the phone company for phone service if you don't want it. Freestanding DSL is now available(product page) in Verizon territory, including parts of California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington state, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, D.C., West Virginia and Wisconsin. This should help lots of people reduce their communications bills and stop paying for services they don't want or need.

This isn't the first service we've rolled out to help achieve that goal. EarthLink DSL and Home Phone service, also known in the industry sometimes as Line-powered voice, was one of the first products we offered that put you in a position to fire your phone company. In fact, search Google for that phrase and as of today the first result is still the blog of EarthLink alum Chris Holland explaining how it allows you to do just that in the areas where it's offered.

All of these choices and the specifics of what's available where can make it difficult to lay out the best option available to someone in a particular place off the top of my head, but at our EarthLink High Speed page you can browse for what's available to your home specifically via the availability check tool. If you want the fastest speeds available and VoIP service that works even if your household power goes out, keep an eye out for DSL and Home Phone service, or if you're in one of the cities where we're building municipal Wi-Fi, that's a good choice for portability. And now in many parts of the country, if you just want plain old DSL but don't want to pay the extra fees associated with keeping a landline active, you can do that too.