ADSL-starved Mac users can rejoice-- Bell Atlantic has finally seen the light. Regular viewers will recall Mac user Steve Godun's Herculean effort to purchase a high-speed ADSL Internet connection for his Mac clone. It seems that Bell Atlantic chose to support only Pentium-based PC's and iMacs for this service, excluding all other Macs for no good reason... or, at least, no good reason that they could elucidate. A full account of Steve's Kafkaesque journey through the labyrinthine bureaucracies of Bell Atlantic customer support is still available at the MacInTouch site-- but this time, there's a happy ending.

Following an absurd saga of frustrating runaround from other Bell Atlantic personnel (which is related in excruciating detail over three hefty web pages), Steve finally received email from someone who actually seemed to understand what was going on. Apparently, Bell Atlantic was simply unaware that retrieving the hardware Ethernet address from a Macintosh is a trivial affair with the use of the right software-- for instance, the Apple System Profiler installed in the Apple Menu on Mac OS 8.5 systems. Bell Atlantic supported iMacs (and not other Macs) because the iMac has the Ethernet address noted on a sticker on the side. However, they are working on their own software to determine the Ethernet address on any Macintosh running System 7.5.3 or higher, and they "expect that solution to be ready in mid-February." Not bad. Although, simply adopting a policy to accept any customer who can readily provide his or her Mac's Ethernet address seems like a logical solution which Bell Atlantic has simply overlooked. Whatever.

The upshot is, Bell Atlantic customers who want to get ADSL for their non-iMac Macs won't have to wait much longer. While that may seem like a minor victory to some, it's always a step in the right direction when another company realizes that Macs aren't second-class citizens. Kudos to Steve for finally winning in the end.