No way, Earthlink via Covad is capped at 384. I'm glad to see that. I feel like anyone who wants DSL should be able to get it, but sometimes that is not the case. DSL service and am getting 1.2 to 1.4 on a regular basis. I am usually waiting on the serving computer if it's slower.
Upload speeds are fine.
One of my concerns is contract length. Somthing is wrong there. Earthlink DSL and my upload is 300k. I'm 14,000 feet away from the CO and used to have Earthlink. When the service started, like you I had the good download speeds, but then I received outages like you report for hours at a time.