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Re: [PLUG] was DCA now Speakeasy
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I work for a company who provisions DSL circuits and there are many
reasons why one user gets an outage, and another does not. Bad wiring
at CO, DSLAM port is fuzzy and needs to be reset, cards aren't seated
right, etc.,. So its very common for two households next to each other
to have varying outages. The ISP only considers it an outage if it
effects a large population, or there is something on the ISP side for
their WAN connection (like their OC3 to Level3 or something).
Like Jeff said, its not the outage - but how the company responds to
it. Whether its DSL, Voice, DS3, whatever, the problem is the telco
business is managed as a pure commodity based operation. As a result,
companies make money by being as cheap as humanly possible. And since
they ALL are cheap, everyone has to follow that example to stay
competitive. That means hiring idiot customer service and tech support
people, and keeping a skeleton crew of platform engineers.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter who you go with - they all stink!
Though, I am optimistic that QoS with FiOS might be improved. Line
quality issues should be less of an issue.
-john
On May 14, 2006, at 5:01 PM, William H. Magill wrote:
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.
Maybe because there was no outage???
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."
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 [Rev A motherboard - 300 MHz 768 Meg] OS X 10.2.8
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com
whmagill@gmail.com
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