[BLU] Re: Connectivity woes in Boston

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Michael Bilow wrote:

> The situation is a little more complicated than you paint it, I think.  By
> way of disclosure, I should say that I have watched the current mess
> evolve as a consultant for a number of ISPs, some of whom are CLECs
> (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, which means they can sell you dial
> tone), and I was at one time a leading advocate for ISDN.

Some excellent stuff there.  In fact, I'd like permission to forward it
onto another list, attributed or not, if that's OK with you.


On piece that is missing though, is that most people like me, with servers
on their cablemodems, couldn't care less about upload speeds.  I have a
web page, a mail server, ftp server, etc., but if it took a little while
for a client to bring it up, that would be OK.  I bought into cablemodem
technology for the constant connection.  If outbound bandwidth was their
only concern, give us 100Kbs instead of 300Kbs.  But there has to be other
issues.

As far as DSL goes, the way I see it is the phone company themselves are
killing it, despite all reasons.  They will not offer attractive services
themselves (no static IP's, very low bandwidth), and they fight tooth and
nail agains doing their part for other DSL providors, by taking months to
do the hookup, or claiming the customer lives too far from the CO.

>From about a year ago til about two months ago, I was really hating
MediaOne/RoadRunner/ATT because my cablemodem dropped sync about once a
week, and they were absolutely no help.  I looked into DSL, and the above
is all I saw.  Those that were happy with it generally waited at least 4
months to get it installed, despite whatever timeframe was quoted them,
and their IP address changed more often than Madonna's hairdo.

About two months ago I convinced MediaOne to come out and check my gear,
since I was logging every single connection drop and logging a single
trouble ticket with all of them.  They removed my antient LanCity metal
behemoth cablemodem and put in a new 3Com job.  Now, it drops sync for 10
seconds or so every few days, but connects again by itself, so I don't
care.  Did not solve the problem, but it did solve the symptom.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD
DKK D  As a SysAdmin, yes, I CAN read your e-mail,
DK KD  but I DON'T get that bored!
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