Well Robert,..I don't any ISP's in your area so I really cannot make any recommendations, but here is some info on what to look for in a DSL ISP.
1) If they want you to use PPPoE for your DSL connection, then run, don't walk away from them. PPPoE allows your DSL connection to be treated like a dial-up, requiring you to provide a user ID and password before your connection is established. It is alos used to terminate a connection, and/or change your IP address at specific time intervals.
2) Try to avoid ISP's that assign 10. addresses to your connection. These addresses are supplied by the ISP that usually uses NAT routing, which means the ISP router is acting as a proxy for your connection. This raises the overhead for the router substantially and also creates problems/slowdowns/lost packets for UDP service.
3) If the ISP uses DHCP for IP Address assignments, ask them what the "lease time" for the IP address is. When the lease time expires on a DHCP address, the connection will get dropped for about 2 seconds while a new IP address is assigned. This can wreak havoc with IRC, RW and other services that require you IP address for routing connections, including all online games.
Go ahead and tell the proprective ISP that you are a gamer, and need good latency for and reliable network flow for UDP. Some ISP's really hate gamers and will immediately tell you so (not so blunt, but you will know).
A good ISP that understands Internet gaming will be very appreciative to have a gamer for a DSL client. Why? Internet games, even the most network intense games, use very little of the DSL bandwidth.
Heck, I would love to have nothing but gamers on DSL.
Hope that helps.
------------------
Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net
