Assuming your spam and Internet filters aren't cranked up to 11, you may have seen naked DSL in the news lately. While it's not as titillating as its adjective suggests, naked DSL has a lot to get excited about.

Broadly speaking, naked DSL is broadband service from a local telephone company that's unbundled from phone service--data without voice. You get broadband Internet access without having to shell out the extra $35 or so your local phone company charges for a dial tone, a phone number, and a few basic services, such as voicemail. With the emergence of VoIP providers, such as Vonage and Packet8, naked DSL is necessary for the DSL subscriber who wants to ditch his or her local phone service for cheap VoIP service or a budget cell phone plan.

	Naked DSL is broadband service from a local telephone company that's unbundled from phone service--data without voice.

The good news about this El Dorado of broadband service is that Verizon finally came forward and offered it in most of its markets--no small feat for a company that has traditionally tied absolutely all of its systems to the phone number. Billing, customer tracking, technical service--everything in a phone company revolves around the 10-digit codes. A phone company that doesn't revolve around phone numbers is like the IRS forgoing the use of social security numbers.

And yet, somehow, Verizon has come forward to offer this service--though in a limited form. Only existing Verizon phone and DSL customers qualify for the offer. For those customers, Verizon lets them drop their local phone service while keeping their DSL connection.

Get naked
To all-cellular phone freaks, VoIP jocks, and other tight-fisted consumers, then, Verizon's naked DSL looks like a big slice of heaven with whipped cream on the side. Compared to the $30 to $35 you pay a local phone company for a lackluster set of phone options, pretty much any VoIP service would be a vast improvement and a medium-to-large cost saver.

A phone company that doesn't revolve around phone numbers is like the IRS forgoing the use of social security numbers.

Back in the salad days of discount long-distance service, I spent many happy hours calculating how to shave my monthly phone bill from an average of $45 with all my international and long-distance calls down to little more than $38. The savings that resulted may constitute only one very cheap night out per month, but I've enjoyed that night out consistently every month for a decade. But with some of the more generous cell phone and VoIP features, my landline is beginning to look like an unnecessary expenditure of decent-night-out proportions.

There are two ways I thought I could go: Drop my Verizon local and long-distance phone service while keeping my DSL subscription and sign up for a service such as Vonage's Basic 500 plan, which provides 500 local and long-distance minutes in the United States and Canada and 3-cent-per-minute calls to the United Kingdom, or spend $10 more for Vonage's unlimited-minutes plan plus the low, per-minute rate to my relatives in the United Kingdom. Either way, I come out ahead of what I'm paying now. And I'll get better phone features while I'm at it.

Next question: Where do I sign up?

Keep your shirt on
The answer is, unfortunately, nowhere. When I tried to sign up for Vonage and later Verizon's own VoIP offering, VoiceWing, the online sign-ups stopped me dead in my tracks when they found out the number I wanted to port onto their service was attached to my DSL service.

"Poor guys," I thought, "They can't have heard of this naked DSL thing yet."

I could be forgiven for my smugness, since it had been available from Verizon for only a week by the time I tried to take advantage of it. But Verizon had the last laugh at my expense. When I called Vonage's customer line, I was informed that DSL signals are carried on phone lines, and that if I cancel the phone line, the DSL would go away. The Vonage assistant clearly thought I was a crank caller when I started using the word naked. So I thought I'd stick with Verizon, and after failing to sign up at its Web site, I called the company up. But I got the same story there, where I used the word unbundled instead of naked to describe the DSL service it supposedly was offering.

The Verizon service rep told me that naked DSL wouldn't happen for another few months and suggested paring down my phone service to a $10 plain dial-tone phone number with no calling services at all (except 911 and incoming calls), moving my DSL service onto that line, and getting my current number ported to VoIP anyway.

I turned down her Byzantine-but-workable scheme when I priced it out at the same as what I'm currently paying. I'd rather wait for the naked DSL to become available, I said, figuring that would be tomorrow when I badgered the head office about it.

As it turns out, not all Verizon markets can handle the naked DSL offering yet. Because of a technical detail so bogglingly obscure that I won't even describe it, my area won't be getting naked anytime soon. Your DSL circuit may be serviced by the same piece of hardware that limits my ability to strip down my DSL to its skivvies, but you won't know until someone turns you down for it or you lose your DSL service in the switch.

I'm still excited by the prospect of naked DSL. But it's only a prospect at this point, and it's no closer to a reality in my area than it was this time last year.

Looking to strip your DSL service down? Tell me about your progress or lack thereof in the TalkBack below.