Broadband Internet Connection Tax, Cable No but DSL Yes

in seventeen states and the District of Columbia according to this NYT article on Excite News. The cost is about $3-4 per month. We tried DSL for the past year but probably will be going back to cable soon. DSL is slightly cheaper and offers a static IP address (for a fee) but is much slower. The frequency of outages, very low, has been about the same for both technologies but more frustrating for DSL on occasion, requiring a contact with support to re-start several times. Once our DSL provider, Earthlink via Covad, completely lost our subscriber records and cut us off. As might be expected, Earthlink and Covad blamed each other and each referred us to the other's seemingly always-busy phone to fix it, losing 5 days of service.