[Discuss] business class ISP recommendations

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

I set up an RCN Business class account a few years ago at work. The
system was generally reliable, and most of the outages were caused by
Regus Office not paying the bill on time. However when we moved from
DOCSIS 2 to DOCSiS 3 they gave me a new IP address even though we paid
for 6 static IP addresses. The first level support people were not very
knowledgeable. The guy argued with me and said that their static IPs are
not really static. After a bit of yelling and telling him what the
contract read, he elevated the issue to engineering and it got fixed. We
had fibre in our building up to our floor so installation was not too
complicated. Another client was told that they would get direct fibre,
but were given a cable modem.

On 05/07/2014 10:28 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Speaking of ISPs...I'm looking to get business class Internet service
> for a home office. At my location I have an "embarrassment of riches"
> and yet none of these are companies I want to do business with:
>
> Verizon Business FIOS
> Comcast Business cable Internet
> RCN Business cable Internet
>
> I'd like to hear from those on the list who specially have had
> experience with the business class service from these companies. (I'm
> not interested in feedback on their residential offerings.)
>
> My expectation is that they will all offer adequate bandwidth, and
> reliability, with FIOS having a bit of an edge for having a technically
> superior infrastructure. (Technically, I believe Comcast offers a Metro
> Ethernet[1] service that is probably as good as or better than FIOS and
> avoids the shared bandwidth typical of their cable modem infrastructure,
> but it probably isn't available in the suburbs (their site says it is)
> or cost effective for a home office (you have to request a quote,
> implying it isn't cheap).)
>
> 1. http://business.comcast.com/ethernet/products/metro-ethernet
>
> Similarly my expectation is that they all offer about equivalently bad
> customer service.
>
> I'm most interested to hear about customer service experiences,
> especially when it comes to dealing with more complex technical matters.
> Have your issues been resolved quickly and favorably? Have you
> encountered finger pointing situations where they tried to shift blame
> to the customer premise equipment or similar? Are they available to
> resolve issues 24/7?
>
> (I've done business with with Verizon (Business) and Comcast
> (residential), and found both to be fairly poor. Comcast ranks as having
> the lowest consumer satisfaction in some recent survey. Their business
> facing customer service might be completely different. It does sound
> like they have competent engineers, but they're trapped under
> incompetent management. I've never done business RCN.)
>
> I'm also interested in hearing of any policy issues you've encountered,
> such as imposed data caps, port blocking, restrictions against running
> servers, etc.
>
> And as a bonus: does the provider offer custom PTR records with their
> static IPs? do they offer IPv6? do they support BGP?
>
>  -Tom
>

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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