[geeks] Why I hate Verizon Online

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 @ 21:06 +0200, Geoffrey S. Mendelson said:

> On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 01:57:18PM -0500, Bryan Fullerton wrote:
> > I'd regularly hit the limit, so I got a second UUCP account with UUNet
> > Canada for overflow -- they were smarter, they just charged for all
> > bandwidth instead of limiting.
> 
> UUNET in the U.S. was pretty bad. They had a no guarenteed service level,
> so one day I ran up about $100 in connect time trying to send
> a 50k email message. They also had an interesting billing policy. If
> you did not pay by the 15th of the month, you were charged an extra
> $50. Considering that the bills did not come out until the second
> or third via email and a week later by paper, it made it difficult
> to pay them.

Sounds about right.

UUNET was really expensive too, and they were really jackasses to talk
with. 

I ended up getting my UUCP feeds from someone connected via a
university, but it was still quite expensive in the end due to phone
company charges.

Even when I got an ISP around 1994 or so, I used UUCP until around 2001.
I ran Taylor UUCP in uucp over tcp mode.

It was a *LOT* faster than smtp or nntp because it was batched and
compressed transfer.

When I moved to smtp and nntp (my ISP begged me to move as I was their
last UUCP customer), it caused a huge increase in my connect time.

> I once asked them how they deal with large companies who would never
> pay a bill that fast and would not stand for the extra charge and they
> just gave me a run around. 

They treated large companies pretty bad too.

Unfortunately, UUNET was there early, and was the only game for some
people.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The trade of governing has always been
monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of
mankind.  -- Thomas Paine"]