🚀 go-pugleaf

I've just been looking over Adler's  unreliability stats for the past
month.  Mine come out similarly.

Comparing the week ending Tuesday with a month ago:

Bruce Adler <bruce.NxOxSxPxAxMx.adler@acm.org> wrote in message
 news:82t6rj$2va$1@ash.prod.itd.earthlink.net...

> Here's a comparision of the number of articles in the comp.unix.solaris
> newsgroup on ELN versus deja.com, as of Dec 11, 1999 0130 PST:

> Datestamp
 > of article         ELN / deja = %
 > MON 12/06/1999     129 /  184 = 70%
 > TUE 12/07/1999     145 /  179 = 81%
 > WED 12/08/1999     106 /  179 = 59%
 > THU 12/09/1999      44 /  161 = 27%
 > FRI 12/10/1999      99 /  147 = 67%
> ....
> The comp.unix.solaris counts as of Jan 12 2000 0200 PST:
> Datestamp of article    ELN / deja = %
> MON 01/03/00  134 /  140 = 96%
> TUE 01/04/00  159 /  169 = 94%
> WED 01/05/00  160 /  190 = 84%
> THU 01/06/00  148 /  200 = 74%
> FRI 01/07/00  117 /  196 = 60%
> SAT 01/08/00   23 /   62 = 37%
> SUN 01/09/00   46 /   67 = 69%
> MON 01/10/00   91 /  171 = 53%
>TUE 01/11/00  111 /  212 = 52%
> ==============================
total         989 / 1407 = 70%

OK, so  for a month ending Tuesday, three out of ten INCOMING posts
never got through, and ELN never really copped to it.   

1. Does anyone have more recent stats ?

2.  Does anyone know the name of that resident freeware program that
extracts new article counts from Agent or Free Agent?    It'll come to
me eventually, and I'd like to get users from other ISPs posting
theirs someplace equally public  for comparison.

A more pertinent stat, and one we should probably monitor more
consistently, is how often ELN is truthful  about "all services online
and operational."

That's easy enough to determine --  just archive their status
reports every few hours, and post it somewhere public next to
comparison stats.  If a few people quietly did that, it might help
Earthlink from minimizing  problems.

Come to think of it,  operational status is a non-admission.
If you capture newsgroups for later reference, and a third 
and a third of the posts have been missing for the past
business week, then "online and operational" has
no meaning.

Nor does "users may have problems logging on" tell
the real story.

A prof suggested something else to maybe do. 

Since we all get called by U.S. Sprint every few weeks, trying to sell
us Earthlink accounts, we could ask Sprint  every month AFTER
WE LEAVE EARTHLINK whether there's anything they should be
telling us about unreliability on Earthlink.  If they say no, well
then compare that with the definition of "fraudulent concealment
of a material fact from customer at time of sale."  Methinks if
Sprint's  were routinely gathered and made public by interested
parties, it might foster market competition.

Again, previous experience with a university ISP shows that the
fit hits the shan when coverup fails, i.e. when enough people
get wise and start gathering data on disservice.  Someone mentioned
elsewhere that, an ISP isn't a captive audience, like a university
( where you can't get another ISP, because the campus phone
system doesn't support digital other than theirs ).   On an ISP,
aren't individual subscribers more likely to walk than to fight ?

Three  exceptions: If you get your ELN  account free through an
employer or contractor, you may be stuck with it unless you can
present evidence that the company should go elsewhere.   Or, if there
isn't a snowball's chance in hell of your company springing for a
better  ISP, you still might agitate to improve the service so you
don't have to go elsewhere and actually pay.

Even if you're a short-term ELN trial subscriber, or a disgruntled
trial subscriber planning to move your site to another ISP, you might
still like to gather stats and pass them around.  So there is a more
or less constant flow of information into the public domain, as
happened with Netcom ( which eventually stopped wooing the
unhappy public, and turned to corporate markets ).

Reliability stats, once generated, also get used by local 
small-business consultants who suggest ISPs.  If they suggest the
wrong ISP, they get burned.  If they warn businesses AWAY from the
wrong ISP, they get points.   A few consulting networks even have user
surveys, and mail drops set up for stats about your ISP.

For those reasons an ISP does have to live up to their reputation,
which tends to get updated every few months, as evidenced by rapid
turnover in the rankings.

I find the dynamics interesting, because good service does seem to
correlate with survival of those ISPs able to maintain it while
maneuvering for growth.  

--  Jim Kutz
Let no politician, no party, influence your vote. If any do not willingly
represent you, vote them out. Let no party tell you what the issues are. Tell
each other what YOUR issues are. Don't fight partisanship. Marvel at it .Link
up with its many opponents. Expedite dissent until partisanship cannot rule.