HARD TO BELIEVE, but it’s been over three years since I first wrote about the cultural-paradigm-changin’ potential of hi-bandwidth home Internet access.

And now I’ve finally taken the personal plunge.

Speakeasy Network, my Web server ever since this site first went up in mid-’95, has become a retail representative and service partner for Covad, which provides home and office DSL lines in 18 U.S. cities. After months of soft-sell hints provided to me by Speakeasy employees about how a cutting-edge cyber-chronicler such as myself really oughta have such a line, I gave in. (It helped that the monthly rate wouldn’t be all that much more than that of a second regular phone line, which my burgeoining (thanks to you) li’l home-office business would soon need anyway.

I’d read plenty-O-horror-tales from around the country, relating individual users’ bureaucratic, technical, and other hangups whilst in the process of getting DSL, ISDN, and/or cable modems installed. I’m happy to report none of those awful things, happened to me, with one slight exception.

My apt. management company, while otherwise quite courteous and efficient, was hesitant about allowing access to my building’s phone-connector box by anyone other than “the phone company.”

That wasn’t a problem for the installation’s phase one, which involved a real US West person (albeit a person working on loan to the overworked/understaffed US West from Bell Atlantic) who came in (albeit one day later than scheduled) and rearranged some wires.

The tricky part would come when Covad’s own guy showed up. My building has no daytime resident manager, so if the installer needed access to the phone box somebody from the management office would have to drive down and let him or her into the utility room. And they didn’t want to do that without proof in writing (preferably including a state contractor number) that Covad was qualified to fiddle around in there.

At the very end of the promised five-hour time window, Mr. Covad showed up. Within 15 minutes, he’d replaced my phone-jack faceplate with a two-outlet model. He stuck an Ethernet cable between the new faceplate’s larger interface and an all-digital DSL modem.

(I know the tech-jargon purists insist the word “modem,” short for “modulator-demodulator,” should only apply to devices that translate digital data into analog audio signals for use on phone lines, but I’m not that literal-minded to mind.)

Another Ethernet cable then went from that box to my trusty ‘puter. Then, a phone call to Speakeasy got me a quick coached session with Apple’s Internet Setup Assistant program. At the end, the Speakeasy coach asked me to test the setup by launching my browser.

Voila! For the first time since my first modem in 1983, I could go online while staying on the phone.

Imagine–no more spending whole days offline, waiting for important phone calls or UPS deliveries (my apt. has a phone-based intercom). Net radio could become a real listening option at Chez Misc., not to mention streaming video channels.

I can’t guarantee your DSL-install experience will be as effortless as mine, particularly if you’re on a Windoze machine (particularly if it’s an older or cheaper Windoze machine that needs an add-on Ethernet card). And it can be a big fiscal jump, particularly if you’re not planning to deduct it as a business expense. And you have to be, or have someone, home in the daytime on two nonconsecutive days to let the installers muck around.

But it can be worth it.

TOMORROW: More thoughts on DSL as a whole different Webbing experience.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.

ELSEWHERE: The Squire Shops folded several years ago. Now another locally-owned clothier to the young and young-at-heart, Jay Jacobs, is on the ropes, unable to compete with the Gapsters for volume discounts and advantageous space leases… More trouble, as well, for the beloved-by-neighbors but shafted-by-landlords Matthews Red Apple supermarket…