[CLUE-Tech] DSL upgrade

[Dan Vande More]

Well, I always seem to see DSL questions on here, and since most of us are not lucky enough to have at&t yet, I've got a few questions.
(BTW, my father-in-law lives in Parker, they are moving to Scottsdale AZ this next week, but before they unhooked I did a test at dslreports.com and it showed about 1.4mb, just shy of a t1 for their at&t cable modem)
I currently use firstlink (http://www.firstlink.com) for DSL services, they have outstanding support (I interviewed for a job when I moved down here last July), amazing uptime (1 hour of downtime around October 15th) and I get 640k sustained. 
I've been to the reviews on earthlink posted on dslreports.com site and also checked out earthlinks site.
I qualify for the 1.5mbs
https://register.earthlink.net/cgi-bin/wsisa.dll/broadband/speed.html
and found other people (Corner of Coal Mine & Wadsworth, according to dslreports, I'm at Chatfield & Wadsworth which is less than 1 mile south) who have 1.5mbs without problems.
I was wondering if any of you had earthlink DSL, how you like it, and why you did/did not choose it. Looking at earthlink's stock is enough to make me scared, but look at anyone's right now will do the same.
If you do use earthlink's service, what modem did they give you. Of course, their salesmen know nothing, and I want to use my Cisco 678 because I know it works with my VPN.
Description of VPN is:
<description>
IPSec traffic consists of three components. UDP/500 is used for ISAKMP key negotiations. IP protocol 50 carries the Authentication Header traffic, and IP protocol 51 carries the encapsulating security payload.
</description>
source: http://vpn.shmoo.com/vpn/vpn-howto.html
The VPN in on a pix 515r
When I got MSN DSL, (which lasted 2 weeks) they sent me a pos Arescom modem(its for sale:)) that ran NAT and gave me an address of 192.168.1.2 and subnetted to allow only 2 ips, 1 for me and 1 for the modem.
This version of NAT also prevented me from using the VPN.
All in all, I'm looking for anyone who has experienced Earthlink's DSL service and what their comments are.
I know how dial-up is, I'm in charge of support for 20 earthlink dialup accounts for our company.
Thanks for any information you can give me.

Dan