[ale] Naked DSL from Bellsouth?

[Steve Tynor]

I've been having a spate of outages on my Comcast cable service lately 
and am looking around for alternatives.  I'm a reasonably happy Vonage 
VOIP user -- the only problems I have with Vonage appear to be directly 
related to problems on the underlying cable connection. I'm in the 
Atlanta area and our neighborhood has fiber - before we switched to 
Comcast, we had Bellsouth DSL and no other DSL provider would offer DSL 
to us due to the need to use fiber-specific SLIC's (?).  This seems to 
still be true after calling Earthlink.

To make a long story short, I am irritated enough at Comcast to want to 
move back to Bellsouth and pay an extra $10/month for "naked DSL" only 
to be told by the phone droids that they do not offer such a thing. 
Their website suggests they do, but google reinforces their story that 
they don't (a slew of mid-2005 press releases saying the FCC had 
reversed its ruling requiring Bellsouth to offer naked DSL).

Is it true?  Have we really reverted back to the bad old days where 
Bellsouth requires $18+ of local phone service in order to sell you a 
DSL line?

Steve