[SunRescue] Real ISPs

[jwbirdsa at carfallin.picarefy.com]

   Well, I'm connected through Seanet in Seattle. I've been with them for
five years and until recently I've been quite happy. However, since the
beginning of this year, they seem to have gone senile, apparently a result
of growth, which means that most of their operation is geared toward
supporting braindead Windows users.
   I celebrated the New Year by being offline for four days because they'd
hosed the routing for my class C. That seems to happen about once a year,
but normally it's just a matter of a phone call to get it fixed. This time,
it took me three days to finally reach a "senior tech" who could even
understand what I was saying. And all he was able to do was tell me that
the one guy who knows how to configure their routers was out sick. Yeah,
they have only one guy who knows how to configure their routers. Gives you
a good feeling, doesn't it?
   Last week, they tried to move me to a different ISDN number, but it
didn't work -- the Portmaster just said "Host is Currently Unavailable"
and hung up. When I called in to report the problem, they gave me yet
another new number to use "temporarily", since nobody could figure out how
to reconfigure the Portmaster. Well, a couple days later, somebody noticed
that I was calling the wrong number and disabled my account. I didn't get
home until late to find out what was wrong, so I was still on hold (after
45 minutes) when their tech support closed for the night. The next morning,
I was finally able to get ahold of somebody and they got that situation
fixed, only to discover that in the process the routing for my class C was
gone again. Luckily, the one guy who knows how to fix that was in the office
at the moment, and so it only took an hour on the phone to get me up and
running again.
   When Seanet works, it works quite well. However, I would have to rate
their support as "absolutely pathetic" at the moment, a big drop from the
"very good" I would have given them only a few months ago.

   Assuming this pattern continues, I will probably change soon, but I'm
not going to bother with trying any of the consumer ISPs. At this point,
what I really want is a business ISP: they're used to hooking up entire
networks, not invididual machines, and they have 24-hour operations
staffing, so there's always somebody to talk to. It doesn't guarantee that
they can fix your problem, but at least you're one step closer than when
you can't even reach anybody because they're closed for the night.
   I haven't done any hard research on the matter yet, but I'll probably
start by looking at CAIS and Sprint.

   --James B.