[SunRescue] Death of (yet another) ISP

[Chris Byrne]

Well, I knew it was too good to last for long. My 1.5meg connection is most
likely going away real soon.

The last few days I'd noticed a bit of sluggishness in my net connection,
but I chalked it up to no more than normal congestion. I woke up early this
morning (around 2) and got online, and it was quite a bit worse, but still
not too bad. It felt like I was on an ISDN instead of my supposedly direct
1.5 circuit.

Then around 6 am it gets to the point where I'm timing out getting my email,
so I started doing some tests, and I'm seing 30% packet loss and RTT's in
the 400msec range to anywhere past my local gateway. This is of course a bad
thing, and must be fixed right away for Chris to stay a happy camper (never
mind my wife, she goes through internet withdrawal like it's heroin). So I
head over to my ISP's web site and I see this lovely notice posted

"WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA, April 2, 2001-- VelocityHSI, Inc. (OTCBB: VHSI),
a provider of high-speed Internet services to the apartment industry today
announced that while it continues to provide service to existing
subscribers, the company currently does not have financing in place to
continue operations after the second quarter of 2001, and could be required
to cease operations as early as May 1, 2001."

Lovely

I call up tech support and let them know theres an issue. We did a little
testing and troublshooting over the phone, and it turns out that two of the
three WAN links that serve our neighborhood (they do four apt. complexes in
this neighborhood, a total of about 1500 apartments) are down or flapping,
and have been for three days. They have let go so many of their staff that
no-one noticed.

At least I got more warning than Northpoint customers

Chris Byrne