We used to get DSL through SBC at my dad's house, and we were happy with it for years. Never had a single problem until the assholes at AT&T came along and took over. Ever since then the service quality has been in a constant decline, with spontaneous inexplicable downtime and, as I learned just recently, usage limits! Fucking ridiculous that they're more than happy to sell us 6 mb/s downstream but then say 150 GB is the download limit. Unfortunately the house I live in has multiple computers hooked up to the router and pretty much everyone downloads with reckless abandon. Music, torrents, and Youtube all fucking day, plus I have a Steam account with something in the neighborhood of 80 games. I've done my part, stopped most of my torrenting and burned disc backups of my larger Steam games, but I can't do much about the other people in the house. As I type this we're within 5 GB of the ceiling (with 10 days left in this billing period), after which we get charged $10 for each additional 50 GB. Not exactly horrible, but still undesirable, as we're living on an extremely tight budget. Every little bit counts. I'd love to switch to a new ISP, frankly AT&T can go suck it for all I care. The service is astoundingly shitty, and once while in live chat with a friend of mine, a customer service rep had the audacity to claim that 150 GB is "really too much!" for anybody to download per month. Bullshit, I say. Sadly there really aren't any other ISPs to choose in town. I've heard good things about Charter, but they aren't offering service around here. What I'd like some advice on is curtailing downloading and uploading on our DSL service without resorting to severely draconian measures, I don't want to have to physically disconnect computers from the network. Obviously nobody in the house will listen to reason, otherwise I think we wouldn't be in this mess, so what choices do I really have? My thought is if I had a real router, not one of these shitty 2Wire Homeportals, I could possibly enforce some sort of bandwidth-limiting measures, but honestly I don't know.
Sadly, AT&T no longer offers ADSL/VDSL modems that are not integrated routers. I'd honestly recommend checking into local alternative cable providers. Charter, Comcast, Time Warner, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Cox, etc. Someone should be operating in your area. I've got Comcast at my house and MetroCast Cablevision at my apartment, and both are quite fantastic these days. The rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 also means that you'll have IPv6 support. Not to mention that it is possible now to get fiber network speeds over cable Internet when you have DOCSIS 3.0.
