| William H. Magill on 14 May 2006 21:02:18 -0000 |
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On 14 May, 2006, at 08:04, Jeff Abrahamson wrote: Since ISP choice gets frequent coverage here and since this is all archived, I thought it important that I note that I no longer feel DCA is such a great ISP. When things go right they're still quite good: fixed IP, reverse mapped, good uptime until recently. But when things have gone wrong they've been abominable where once they were exceptional. I've seen two outages recently. My neighbor, using Speakeasy, called S tech support and was immediately told (network status recording) that there was an outage covering a broad region. When I called DCA support, the recording in both instances said no problems, even 12 hours into the outage. The system email status list never mentioned it either time.
I run a monitor on my DCAnet line (Verizon based) and I only see two outages recently. One in March, one in April and none in May. And both outages in March and April were for less than two minutes each. Interestingly, Jeff and I live about three blocks apart as I recall, so we share the same CO. However, a friend of mine who also lives on the same street Jeff lives on about two blocks further west with Verizon DSL has had all kinds of trouble since it was installed about 4 months ago. (Dan's about another 4 blocks south of Jeff as I recall... We're all in University City, aka West Philadelphia.) Most recently, about a week or two ago, that friend had a significant connectivity outage -- Verizon apparently had some kind of backbone issue in that the PPPoE link worked fine, but nothing was getting off Verizon's network into the Internet backbone. Packet loss was horrendous and traceroute was ridiculous. I can't say that I've had much reason to call on DCAnet tech support recently for anything other than a website they are hosting for a local organization I support. However, the same folks appear to be still there and answer my questions without much fanfare. I still use Tru64 Unix for one server and OSX for the other, but the DCA folks don't seem to care. Maybe because I've been a customer since the beginning I always get "the good techs."
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