🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3C635376.31AEB02B@no.where>, John Sessoms  <no.one@no.where> wrote:
>Michael Austin wrote:
>> 
>> I am not advocating staying with or dropping BSIS, just to throw in
>> something to think about... where ever you are located your DSL provider
>> will always be one step removed from your primary telco.
>> 
>> Example:
>> BellSouth is the ONLY local phone company.  Your wire connects
>> (eventually) to their CO.  If you go with Earthlink (or whatever) you
>> will use the BS DSLAM with some sort of gateway to EL. Then you move
>> into EL's backbone that will then take you to UUNET and you get to where
>> you want via that entire connection.
>> 
>> In otherwords, if you get slow response from the primary telco, you will
>> get even worse response from the upstream provider.  And they may have

Which ain't necessarily so...

>> not be any better at supporting their network than BSIS does.
>> 
>
>BSIS hasn't been "slow". That's about the only thing that is working.
>
>It's all the problems with newsgroups, email outages, outsourcing
>support to some trojan-ware site, their general non-responsiveness
>when problems arise and/or the nonsensical, absurdly demonstrably
>false responses when they do deign to respond, and their apparent
>non-concern regarding SPAM.

DirecTV, despite all of the moaning from some people (one of which
who is now moaning about RR service,[1] so, go figure), has been fine
for me, with the exception of occasional DNS flakiness (easily 
cured by "borrowing" someone else's DNS for the evening), and 
somewhat spotty news server performance (the speed varies), which I 
don't use very much anyway.  I'm getting no SPAM, but, I haven't 
broadcast any email addresses, either.  When I moved this fall (and 
migrated from being a "former Telocity customer" to being an "official" 
DirecTV customer), I had problems that were due to BellSloth's slackness.  
Tech support was courteous, knowledgeable, and efficient.  I wasn't 
treated like *I* was the problem (ARE YOU LISTENING, EARTHLINK?)  When 
Level 1 support couldn't fix the problem, I was referred to Level 2 with 
no delay, where the problem was diagnosed in one brief session, (the Tech
called *me* back when I was unable to work with him on the spot) and fixed 
the next day.  Since then, (I know, I'm asking for it here) my connection
has been stable, with very consistent throughput performance.
 
>I could probably live with some of the problems if I could only get a
>straight answer out of them once in a while, instead of being jerked
>around.

Try DirecTV.  The only vendor with Tech Support that's ever called *me*
back to work on the problem.

[1]  IMNSHO, broadband service/support is about where dialup was back
     when the only provider in the area (predating VNet, NANDO, etc)
     worth using was the old MCNC (now NC-REN) Concert-Connect, which 
     got bought by Interpath (and actually continued to be a great 
     service until all of the old MCNC'ers started leaving).  For 
     those of you who weren't around then, this was early 1992, so, 
     think of how dialup was then, and you'll understand a bit more 
     about why broadband is in the shape it's in.

-- 
  Tom Wilson          | Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to
  SAS Institute Inc.  | reinvent it, poorly.
  sasctw@unx.sas.com  |                      -- Henry Spencer  
          Opinions are mine, not of SAS Institute Inc.