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The Extinction Of The Mom & Pop ISP Service?
RFL asks: "SFGate (site of the San Francisco
Chronicle) has this feature article describing the unexpected deaths of local Internet Service Providers after they are taken over by large telecommunication companies, leaving the customers totally forgotten. Only after giving it a moment of thought did I realize that a lot of those small ISP's, the ones with those cool cool domain names, were in fact gone. These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC. So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations?" As it is with most companies that get swallowed up by larger entities, the increase in customer base usually means a decrease in customer support and personal-touch that made earlier ISPs so successful. Is there still room for the small-time ISP in today's market or has dial-up Internet become solely the realm of big-time providers?
My boyfriend used to work as client relations manager for a small ISP that was bought out by Verio. Verio proceded to lay off the former owner (who was also the chief engineer, and the only one who knew some of the infrastructure, Doh!) and piss off most of the staff. Their service went downhill rapidly.
They were planning the regional infrastructure to support their ISDN/Frame/T1 clients, and decided that a T3 (with NO redundancy) was sufficient to service all of them. After my non-techie boyfriend took exception to this in an engineering meeting, they finally consented to put in a T1 as backup in case the T3 fell over.
Well, no surprise, the T3 eventually fell over. Unfortunately for them, the T1 wasn't in place yet, and they had most of their larger clients off the air for 48 hours. The regional VP's solution? Did they, maybe, as the client relations manager suggested, offer not to charge these irate customers for their dedicated service being down? Of course not. That would have made sense. Instead they sent them COFFEE MUGS with the company logo on them.
My boyfriend left soon after.
But I still have a T-shirt that Verio printed up shortly after they took over. It was (I think) misprinted, and was supposed to have some pithy "call us for bandwidth" message on it. Unfortunately for them, the last few words were chopped off, and it just said, in big letters under the comapny logo:
"Thinking about the internet? Dont"
Erm, why is this "unexpected"? The Internet is big business, and larger companies can do it cheaper, just like they can do everything else cheaper. The majority of people want cheap. Until, of course, they have a problem, but then they've already paid for it ...
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"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
It is socialist! :P
Me and a couple of friends saw the trend of the corporate giants taking over the ISP market and realized a buck could be made helping them. So we started a small company that was geared to small ISP's being able to add services and features they would otherwise miss out on. It was free to the ISP and yet after talking to literally over 1400. They all felt like they were secure in their market. Then the pressure started hitting with more and more players and they began partnering with each other to provide larger access areas instead of realizing they needed value added services to offer to their customers. By the time they realized it, the others were several steps ahead of them.
I love cheering for the little guy, but they kinda dug their own grave.
Razzious Domini
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
The market for the mom'n'pop shop is dwindling. They have to either:
Grow their own 'large' business (and thus lower their service/support)
or
Offer a unique service, fit into a niche.
Otherwise people are just going to buy the cheapest. You generally can't offer cheap unless you have a large customer base, and few employees which generally means inferior service.
But then there's the whole other issue of what you feel service is. Large corporations can afford a multi-tier approach to service, and that is what generally is best for the majority of clueless users. It pains us because we know that everytime we call we have to go through 2-3 tiers before we get someone who knows as much as we do. Sure, we could get better service, but we would be paying more, and guess which most of us geeks choose: Good service/Low price?
-Adam
Saving the world one CR/LF at a time.
Web developer:
Resume
Small ISPs will continue to survive if for no other reason than some people will not settle for the "one size fits none" mentality of bigger organizations. Even if they disappear for awhile, they'll show up again to provide service to the technically savvy (niche market now). IBM provided great service as a national level ISP. Shell accounts, support for other than M$ OSs, good support and international access. Then they sold that part of their business to AT&T, with the new appearance of busy signals and lower connect speeds. I've noticed that many people only look at the price. They either want the cheapest and don't care about service (don't understand the subject matter) or they want only the most expensive (don't understand the subject matter). Some friends of mine have switched ISPs for a mere $1 less per month!
2 things haven't changed since the days of the chariots; 1) you gets what you pay for; 2) caveat emptor!
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
1) When companies merge or buy out services, it generally results that after sufficient time for the merger to settle down that the ratio of support staff/funding to customers is less than what it was of either company to start with. It seems a lot of these service companies believe that they can scale their support staff on the order of O(log N), as opposed to O(N). Recently, Ameritech/SBC got slammed for doing this after SBC bought them out; they cut support staff and now the companied company is getting an earful from irate utilities commissions in the midwest for bad service.
2) Mergering of services nearly almost always adjust to the lowest common demonator, based on the extent of the service. I know of small dialup ISP which offered a true 24/7 connection (that is, you can be dialed-up online at all times, save for necessary redials, and they wouldn't blink), and when bought out, this service option suddenly disappeared, forcing users to moderate their connect time to free the modem pool for others. One of the things I'm watching for is the vast differences in what you can do on the upstream end of your DSL line that exist between the providers - some allow nearly everything you can do and don't care if you saturate your upstream line, some say you can't even read certain sites on the net, much less use ip masq or services. When the DSL providers start to merge, it'll be interesting to see how they handle this service merging.
3) As a whole, Americans have grown adjusted to the fact that you can't get good service anymore; on the viscious circle, companies realize they don't need to worry about good service, and cut back, giving their customers even worse service. This is not just in the ISP/telecom industry, but all over the place. Gas stations allow you minimal if any interaction with the store clerk to avoid that hassle, supermarkets have options to bypass the cashier with self-scanning items, and the introduction of the ATM has made the teller person nearly obsolete -- nearly all of these innovations came about because those stores and businesses undercut their service staff, creating inefficient and poor service; the automated versions were created to aliviate that problem, but as more people opt for these automated services over the real person, the service personnel become deadweight, and service is cut back more...
I don't think there's really any way to get out of this trap of poor service leading to expect poor service, either.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
no dialup (afaik), but for hosting of email, webspace, dns, you can't go far wrong imho.
;) still possible now, but as they have a better email handling system, response from them is great. i'll give you an example.
:)
:)
they aren't as small as they used to be, but they still have a great touch. you used to be able to "write root" for immediate tech support
i am writing an app that's pretty DB intensive (mySQL), so i wrote to them asking for suggestions on how they'd recommend writing it to minimise the load on their servers. within 2 hours i had 2 responses from admins (the reply and a followup) covering different aspects of it. however that wasn't the best part. a *week* later, i get an email from an admin again, saying that as they've recompiled it and done some extra tweaks, what i would be doing shouldn't be a drain on resources anyway. now THAT's what i call service.
it's "web hosting for geeks". there wont be much help to "my internet is broken", you're left pretty much alone with a shell (but isn't that a dream come true?), but for any genuine problems, they're right on the ball. they've even written their own app for managing pop3 accounts, aliases, virtual domains, mysql databases and such.
ssh and telnet access, unlimited bandwidth, up to unlimited storage space, all linux or bsd servers... many more features, i'm not going to go on anymore, just go look at their website
http://www.csoft.net
Fross
- a satisfied customer
I'm with SWBell for ISDN service and internet service. If you call tech support all you get is someone who just wants to know what version of your browser you are using and to make sure you know how to plug in the line to your modem.
I have used local services but they all (get this) refuse to provide me with ISDN service that I can use all I want. When I mention wanting to leave the modem connected 24/7 they freak and tell me that if they see me on for more than a "reasonable time" at one clip they'll cut me off. It "ties up their lines." So I'm stuck paying a fortune to use SWBell who has nothing but 1st tier support; I'm not too sure anything past that exists there.
"Say no more..." - Monty Python
Your boyfriend, Dennis Miller, still has a late night talk show. It's on HBO.
I wouldn't really follow the teachings of Herr Miller as strictly as you do. He's just another pseudo-intellectual attacking those who dislike conventional wisdom.
When you move into a broadband world, the small ISP can't compete with the telcos which are selling them the infrastructure. The Telcos know that they need to be on both sides of the market, infrastructure and service provider, and already own the customer relationship so even big ISPs may find it very difficult to compete with the average behemoth of a telco.
However, when it comes to this sort of service, as long as the "evil corporation" provides the right level of service, I'm not worried. The bad ones will lose out since unsatisfied customers can always walk (I'd rather pay a touch more for a quality service than put up with a cheap, bad one). Even big telcos now have competition: It just takes one to differentiate on quality...
That's the thing, now that Internet access is a maturing industry and the voice-line modem kludge is no longer adequate, you really need to own your own infrastructure. I keep waiting for someone to build fibre-to-the-home and leapfrog the cable cos hybrid plant and especially Ma Bell's copper hacks (DSL). You could use the fibre as a digital TV (think DSS receiver over landline, only HDTV-everything) and digital telephone transport with analog converter box (IP multicast for TV?) because they're just another datastream, but high-bandwidth data transport would be its primary purpose. Yes, capital intensive, but it'd be amusing to see how the existing monopolies (with their sunk costs) deal.
I think you have to differentiate between what happens when small ISP customers are absorbed into a large ISP and the service that a large ISP gives its typical customer.
I owned and ran a small ISP for about six years. When we started out, big companies didn't do a very good job of getting people online. Getting the tcp/ip stack to work was often difficult, and strange modem problems were common. So there was a real niche for a company like ours, which could try to put more effort into getting people online.
And when people had problems, they could call or email us, and I'd pick up the phone. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I was the person who built the entire system, and I think I was probably able to give better support than the average support guy at a large ISP.
But times changed. If you buy a computer now -- almost any computer -- the odds are overwhelming that it's going to work. It's really easy to set up net service on a modern windows machine. After we sold our company, I went to the Earthlink site and signed up. I was online immediately, with no hassles. And they have access numbers all over the country. I've even used it in Paris. That's a big advantage. I think Earthlink does a good job.
When small ISPs were cannibalized by the large ones, it was very bloody. Customers were jerked around, email addresses were often forcibly changed, and the deals were always very bad for the guys who had the small ISPs. We were lucky -- we sold to another small ISP, and they've just added to our features, nothing was taken away. Not even the shell accounts.
Typically the large ISP wrote the contract -- they agreed to pay so much per customer, but only for the customers who stuck through the transitition. So when 1/3 of the customers dropped off, it was no skin off the big ISP's nose. They didn't have to pay for those people. And there are lots of horror stories about the big guys not paying the money that they owed legitimately, even under the lopsided contracts that they wrote.
We were approached over and over again by large ISPs who wanted to buy us. They would invariably change the terms at the end of the negotiation, and back out of comittments they had made to us. For the most part the guys who built those large ISPs through aquisition were bottom feeders, sharks who were trying to pick the bones of distressed small businesses. Most of them didn't seem like honest guys. So it was never surprising to me that guys like that didn't treat the customers well.
The real problem with the big players is that they're few in number and are vulnerable to pressure. A world with 100,000 mom and pop ISPs isn't as easy to wiretap as a world with 3 blue chip corporate ISPs. And every now and then Time/Warner/AOL or AT&T will say someting really scary -- like how they think that e-commerce people should pay them a commission, how they would be completely within their rights to block access to whatever sites they felt like blocking.
Big ISPs can provide good service, especially in a simpler world where things tend to interoperate more easily. But I don't feel confident that the market or the government will always protect consumers the way that they deserve.
In the old days they forced the guys who owned the movie theatres to sell the studios they owned. The wisdom of such a move isn't apparent to most people now. The "synergy" of having the pipe and the content is seen as a good thing.
I'm certain that we're going to see attempts to build copy protection into the net itself. I think they'll fail, but the companies will try. Those are the kinds of problems, I think, are going to be the real costs of the consolidation of the mom and pop ISPs into a small number of large companies.
There is actually the formentions group of geeks getting together and forming an ISP. We have one in Southern Maine, called Points South. They are more knowledgable about computers than most people. They are still in business after 5+ years. We've been with them since for duration. They offer much better prices than any of the other ISP 's in the area.
Your pain is funny
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
In my area there's about 6 local ISP's I can think of that have each been in business a good two years minimum. The only national service I know of that's available here is AOL, and it's limited (not enough lines). The "big guys" haven't seen fit to come in and buy up our small local ISP's. It seems that maybe in our case, companies like SWBell has it better if they DON'T buy these ISP's. They can either provide 6 customers high-end lines, such as T1's or better, or they can buy the ISP's, take all their customers and have to support and collect money from all of them. Seems to me it would be easier to support and collect from 6 than 60,000.
And where is broadband in this situation? Virtually non-existent. Cable modems just came into play here in the past year and they have a so-so reputation. (Tried it myself, it sucked. Upload speeds of 1k/sec.? Uh, no thanks!) DSL? Only available in a very, very limited area downtown, to be expanded in about 2 years. ISDN is the only choice where I am, and it's $200+ a month.
Is our market ripe for a "big player" to come in an offer something good for once? It seems there's only one city in the whole state that ever gets any of the new services. Our city has a population over 50,000. Are we the only decent sized place being forgotten?
"Say no more..." - Monty Python
As with everything it all depends on the circumstances. Smaller companies are (in general) far better at customer relations because they have more resources to spend per customer in this department, and the people running them depend on this for their livlihood so they're motivated to help. But a larger company can pass on economies of scale to it's customers in the form of reduced prices, special deals and so on.
It's all a matter of what kind of service you want - cheap or good. And let's face it, most people prefer to have a cheap service that they can then bitch about to one where they pay a lot more but get help. As a culture we're used to waiting half an hour on the phone for some support person who has no more idea about your problem than you do, so we've in a sense become inured to such treatment.
So I think that smaller ISPs aren't really a hugely viable concern. If they could work, I'd say it would be by catering to areas where a lot of help is needed that a large company won't provide - to nursing homes for instance. Otherwise people will try and save a few dollars everytime.
Capitalism does not necessarily imply corporations. You can have the benefits of capitalism without creating [corporations].
But can you? Sure, capitalism existed long before the state created the corporation. The mischief the legislature sought to address in creating the legal person of the limited liability corporation, however, was capitalism's inability to raise funds sufficient for the really large scale projects which became technologically possible following the industrial revolution.
Imagine investing in the joint-stock company of pre-corporate times. This is essentially a partnership, in which each investor is jointly and severally liable for the misdeeds of the company. Unlike investment in a limited liability corporation, where (as an investor) the most you can lose is your investment, the creditors of the joint-stock company could come after you (possibly you alone) and claim anything you owned until the debt was paid. Would you invest in such a non-corporate company? (So much for a world of pure contract.)
Sure the modern corporation might be said to be "evil" (inasmuch as this is appropriatetly predicated to a non-natural person), in that it exercises domination over natural individuals. In part this stems from the very ability to raise capital and the resultant conglomeration of power. Power which rivals (and nowadays even outstrips) that possessed by the state. Beyond this, the core aim of a corporation, to maximise the investment of abstract shareholders, means that it is legally oblidged to disregard the public interest where this diverges (except in some places [Massachusetts??] where the corporations law has been explicitly amended to allow 'socially beneficial' activities). People attack Phillip Morris for spending more on advertising about the charity they give out, than on that charity itself, for targeting favourite charities of key legislators etc etc. Aren't they are supposed to be ruthlessly pursuing the interests of their shareholders? (Truly pure corporate philanthropy is a dubious proposition -- how can the directors justify giving away money that belongs to the shareholders?)
You are right to stress that the corporation is not an inevitability. In fact it is the creation of legislatures, and the expression (to varying degrees in different countries) of the democratic process. It is in fact a semi-public thing -- limited liability is a subsidy granted to corporations by the people in return for the possiblity of large scale development. Now, when MegaCorp(tm)(c) threatens democracy itself, we should not ignore democracy's capacity to shape the corporation. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as you seem to be suggesting, we might want to consider ways in which corporate power can be tamed, without losing the benefits which limited liability, and its corollary, corporate personality, bestow.
On the other hand, perhaps we should have all really major devlopment under direct democratic control.   ;P
You can pay for the privilege! You were not forced to leave, you CHOSE to leave. So you personally are pushing them out of the market. Don't you pay your shareware fees? If you really like that small ISP, you should support them with $s not words.
I used to work for a small ISP called ISPdotcom.com. Do you have any idea how hard it is to tell someone how to setup their email with a name like that? This company went out of business after a year, mostly because of lack of support. It is much harder for a smalltime ISP to have 24 hour support, because it requires at least 3 support techs. Also, there is a lot of overhead with an ISP...it is a shame that the big guys are taking over, but that's just how it works in America. I wish we could go back to the days when not every jackass in the neighborhood had a computer that they could screw up then call me for free help....
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
The only possibility I see for life after death is for individuals with very powerful computers and quick connections (being used for some other activity or job), allowing a small number of accounts on the machine to supplement their income. I would love a T1 to myself, but even if I could afford one, I wouldn't use up its capacity and could easily pass some on by allowing cheap or even free dial up accounts to friends and family.
Also what about co-operative style ISPs. A bunch of geeks getting together to purchase a shared T1? Possible or not?
this signature is a virus, please make me your
There's a HUGE gap between Home ISP serveice, and Corporate ISP service. While I can agree that Mom and Pop ISPs are good for the standard Dial-up user, they are a pain for the corporate user.
<vent>
I am currently attemping to move off of our current 'Mom and Pop' ISP, who provides us ISDN service, to a national ISP with T1 service. Unforunately, my predecessor had our domain name in his name, and the current ISP. All I needed was a name change to be authorized by them. That's it. Nothing more. The local admin ended up calling president of MY company, to whine about what I wanted to do.
Hello?!? We're moving off you. I don't need your DNS. I don't need explanations on how a Domain Arbitration would be needed if someone not related to the company had complete control of the domain name (what moron would do that).
Of course, the president felt like 'mom' after all this. Nobody need that crap. Especially when they aren't required to know those details.
At least when I've asked the 'evil' corporations to do step 1, they didn't whine to my boss about steps 7 and 8.
</vent>
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- All your estrogen are belong to us!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I forget where I found this (maybe it was on /. If so I'll feel like an idiot) But check out
http://www.lariat.org
It's a town that got together and set up their own ISP.
I'm in the monterey bay area.
www.redshift.com
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
I also agree that local ISPs provide better service than larger companies. In the bustling metropolis that is Fort Dodge, Iowa, we have 2 ISPs. One is the phone company and the other is DodgeNet. DodgeNet provides free service to their customers and are very knowledgeable. Plus they run linux/apache on their systems. For $15.95 the service can't be beat! (props to Paul Carpenter & Craig Foster!)
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Local San Francisco ISP still kicking after a few years. Monkeybrains appeals to DIYer's so it's not growning too fast, but the customers stick around and are happy to have an alternative to the big ISP's. Runs on FreeBSD!
-cor
A shell account is access to a shell on a unix box, for using pine or mutt if you like, setting up your web space, idling on irc using screen, etc.
zsazsa
In my local area, both Grex and M-Net provide free basic access, and e-mail. They are both run as a essentially a co-op, with all users having a say in system policy. However, they don't market themselves as ISP's, rather, online communities and BBS's.
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No, that's not the show he means. Dennis Miller actually had a show that was syndicated a while back, that you could get for free, over the air.
Basically it was a clone of the Tonight show format, with a news segment and all the other fun stuff. After it went under, then he got the HBO gig, which led him to Monday Night Football, where he is, IMHO, as inconspicuous as a turd in a punch bowl. (I like Dennis Miller. I like Monday Night Football. I don't like the combination.)
There is at least one ISP I know, Quik, of which provides global services yet has a number of local offices throughout the US. These local offices, at least the one in my area, has the feel of a small ISP, with excellent support, a locally run user newsgroup, local log-on servers and 24-hour tech support. I think it's been a very successful model for them. Quik is one of the few ISP's in this area that is still around and still has plenty of modems in the pool.
Apparently I'm getting into this a little late ... WTF is a "shell account"? I've never used one, I've never even seen anyone offering one. What is it, and why would I want one? What could I do with it that I can't do with a "web/email" type of account? I am limited to dialup, they haven't put DSL in here yet and I simply wouldn't trust our cable provider even if I could afford it! (This is not a troll, not flamebait, I am simply looking for information.)
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
My first real official "career" type job was as a network admin and webmaster for the performing arts venue at my university... only about 40 machines total, it was a great job, the people ruled, even if they weren't exactly savy, they learned well... except the director. I've never known a more mentally stunted individual in such a position of importance.... I got called into his office several times: 1) In a panic he calls me, I rush on over, he's sweating and wide eyed saying "I deleted Microsoft Office from my machine" I'm thinking... man, is he really dumb enough to hack one of my boxes on accident? So I look, his apps are all still there, and all will start up... so now I'm a bit worried, thinking he's just insane, and I finally realize he's worried about the stupid shortcut bar. I made him a button on the desktop to "Install MS Office" so he could use it if he ever "deleted" office again... phew, what a turd. 2) I got moved to a different office, and was next to his... one day he was "moved" by a performance he had seen the previous night (he flew around the world going to plays and shows to see if he wanted them at our venue... sweet job) and he hooked up his stereo in his office and started playing a cd of the piece really loud... all day long, so annoying... towards the end of the day he comes in and says his computer is broken... I figure he danced around and knocked it over or something, so I go look... This turd had actually unplugged it to plug in his stereo, and was unable to realize he needed to plug it back in. Anyway... there's more, but this is already long... What I learned there, though, was that people in general need good tech support. They need people who are nice and won't call them an idiot to their face, and can figure out what their problem is after hearing it from them in "idiot-ese". Once I was able to start understanding what their problem really was (i need internet installed, i deleted netscape, etc...) things ran so much more smoothly and they were ultimately very pleased. These people got free ISP service from the university, but many actually paid for service from other companies because the tech support was available and good... it was a small ISP owned by an @sshole, but his tech support folks were genuinely nice and always did their best to help. They also understood idiot-ese, the most important thing they could... So I do not think small ISP's will ever completely disappear. Being able to have no computer knowledge, but pay someone to set up your machine, make you shortcuts and a pretty desktop and show you how to push a few buttons and then surf the web, who will answer all your ?'s quickly and politely, made these folks pay for something they got for free without the tech support...
-- there is no point in pulling the pud... if you do it right.
Yes, of course, there's room for small mom and pop ISP's. The problem is, very few people want to pay the extra costs for all that personalized service.
Sure, it's nice to be able to chat with a tech you know on IRC, but think about the math... how much are you paying? How many customers can he chat with? What does he need to be paid to make it worth his while?
If people wanted to pay $40 a month or so, maybe more of these ISP's could survive. But they (i.e. "we") don't want to pay that much. In fact, even the best dialup service is so miserable that most folks I know are using the free services when they need dialup access.
And in fairness, not all those little ISP's are any good. Some are pretty ragtag operations, and tech support is often provided by whoever is stupid enough to take the job. Yeah, I've had some good ones. But I recall one in particular, the classic small ISP started by a bunch of Linux geeks, really great guys. They had plenty of business (mostly corporate leased lines), but had a terrible time hiring qualified people, so they finally cashed in and sold out to Verio. More power to 'em, I say.
This is not about evil corporations gobbling up the little guy, it's about consumers saying they prefer low prices and consistency mediocre service. The Verios of the world have bailed out a lot of little ISPs and put some cash in the pockets of the folks who worked hard to start 'em. If the little guys couldn't sell out, they might just go broke, and that would truly suck.
when it comes to well-run networks vs the right domain extension, there's nothing like having your priorities straight, is there?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Yup, up hea in Vermont we had a great local ISP - together.net. Great service; nice folks. Well, six months back, Megadeath.net came in and bought the company - "no changes, same great service" they said, they even started a decent local e-newsletter, sent out biweekly. Two months ago they fired 50 of the 52 people that worked here and consolidated operations. Last week they raised dialup charges $5. Our money now flows south! Same great service though, and a reeel nice e-newsletter. -bucky
We were approached over and over again by large ISPs who wanted to buy us. :-)
/."
I worked for a mom 'n' pop for a year (hiya, dethro!) and it was painful to watch the bigger ISP's circle us like a dying animal. But being so close to my clients (I was the webmistress) and having them know they could call me whenever, or knowing that you could call the president at home if your email went down, or page the sys admin at 3am, those kinds of things were really cool. Not to mention being able to stay late and play Q2 on the T1, muahahaha!
I've had friends who worked for the bigger companies, and I'm glad I never went that route. I'm dealing with Verizon right now in a frustrating attempt to get DSL at home, and their customer support is a fscking joke. When OH When will cable modems become available in my city?!
[Pardon my rant.]
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
It's odd that they didn't roll over the old customers. When all the little isps out here were getting bought out, they at least kept the customer base.
You paint the picture like they're all good operations tho. My isp (xmission.com) is an indepdent isp that just managed to be an excellent source of internet service, and is now the largest and oldest in the state. Quality persists. Companies get bought out for one of two reasons: They wanted to get bought out, or they had no choice but to get bought out. Greed or incompetence, either way.
I've seen a lot of little ISPs go down the toilet, and that's where most of them belonged.
Case in point: an outfit called Legacy Internet. These guys used to rent an office in a building i used to work in. My employer owned the whole building, and, being less than 100 yards from the CO, and with a frame relay circuit undernieth the parking lot (with conduit direct to the CO), you could have considered the building extremely wired. So a lot of ISPs rented unused office and closet space from us.
Legacy Internet advertised on their flyers that they would "Bring you the internet with the technology of Windows NT". Basically, they had two generic PCs in their office, one of them aparantly a web server, the other one with a big MUX next to it and a huge stack of loose generic modems. Oh, and a gigantic pile of NT how-to books next to the desk.
Legacy Internet was literally a mom&pop. A literal mom and a literal pop. They may have even been retired.
Almost invariably, if i was working late, they'd show up at about 6:30pm, with tired, frustrated faces, and groan over their how-to books and NT boxes.
For some reason they didn't have an actual phone in there, even though they had a great bundle of POTS lines. We had configured the phone in the lobby to have no dial tone. It worked fine if you dialed on it, it just had no dial tone. This was a surprisingly effective cost cutting measure. Before we did this, people would wander over from other businesses in the building and make long distance calls after hours.
So, anyway, one night I'm working late, and they're sweating over half a dozen NT How-To books, and it turns out they want to order a pizza.
One of them spent ten or fifteen minutes puzzling over the phone in the lobby. I walked past a few times picking up stuff from the printer. Finally, she asks me how to use the phone. So I say "Just select a line and dial" "But there's no dial tone" "There won't be a dial tone. Just select a line and dial" "What?" "It works fine, just select a line and dial your number"
Ten minutes later, utterly frustrated, she decided to walk out and get the pizza in person. Sad, sad, sad.
Legacy Internet is long gone, absorbed by a bigger, more competent company. Good riddance.
In comparison, the two other ISPs renting from us at the time, Aros.net and concentric.net, had far fewer troubles. Every three or four months some boxes would show up via FedEx for Concentric, a half hour later a technician would show up, install whatever was in the boxes, and leave. Aros was just using us as a backup emergency POP, and would send a technician out to manually busy-out a malfunctioning modem from time to time. Aros is still going strong, and everyone knows concentric.
It all boils down to competence, whether that's financial or technical. An independently owned ISP *can survive, if it has the requisite skill, and honestly wants to.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Larger ISP's have approached us several times, but we never have really even given them the time of day. We have a successful niche established, a strong client base, and the best tech support in town. We are even making a profit. *gasp*!
.com's played the IPO game, or overspent themselves early in the game. As I look at the industry, I see a lot of poor business plans, that overestimated revenues and underestimated costs. And a lot of owners that sucked too much money out of the company as salary. Unfortunately, a lot of M&P ISP's probably got sold because they couldn't handle the financial strain. Not that running a M&P ISP is impossible, but it does take a lot of restraint.
:)
We were approached by OneMain, over a year ago. My upstream provider, and theirs, both sold to OneMain. A year later, the guys that tried to convince me to sell are now no longer with the company; those two offices were both shut down. Turns out I would have been downsized 6 months ago, if we had sold.
Too many ISP's and
I'm quite happy to be the owner of a small ISP. The big guys can't trample too badly, cause we are established, profitable, and user-friendly.
And we have the flexibility that large behemoths only dream of.
A boat is a hole in the water into which one throws money. An ISP is the same thing, only it's a hole in an office building.
Consider this: A large organization can buy bigger pieces of hardware, so that the price per port (for "phone" lines, never mind that they're not real phone lines at all any more) plummets to nothing. They can do this so effectively that a small ISP can outsource its dialup, and the company selling them the phone lines is still making a profit. So obviously, volume makes a big difference.
So, let's say the actual costs of someone running a 10,000 user "modem" bank boils down to $7 per user per month when you count every bit of overhead; Power, rent, business licenses, admins, et cetera. You sell this service to a mom and pop ISP for $10 per user; They sell service to their users for $17.50 per user. They probably actually gain about a quarter per person per month.
Meanwhile, a bigass ISP down the street has their own modem banks, which costs them $7 per user per month. They sell ISP service for $15.00 per month. Since they're buying more space, they get the space cheaper per square foot. The more modems you have, the more users per modem you can support, because you can better support those times when more people want to get online, so they can have maybe 11 users per modem instead of 10, perhaps. They end up making more money per user. They buy the mom and pop ISP, shut down their office and their servers, fire all their people, and put the money into buying more hardware for their gigantic userbase.
Service is cheaper through them. You might not get as much of it, but people look at price first, for the most part, unless they're brainwashed into buying into one brand name. So it's not hard to see why the small ISPs are dying. Economies of scale are a bitch.
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uh, if you issue stock, you have no legal responsibility to the people who bought the stock. There's no interest (closest is dividends, but smaller companies don't pay dividends).
There are good moms and pops and there are bad ones. Yes, it was personal and the domain's techcontact was the admin himself.
Years ago, when the Usenet was fun, some mad man from Colorado (elected Kook of the Month, BTW), objected to some of my postings. He called his police department (somewhere in Colorado), and the police department in Needham, MA -- the town were my then-ISP (GIS.net, a.k.a. TheCIA.net) was located. He told them, I'm using the ISP to connect to my University account, which is somehow illegal. He made such a ruckus evidently, that the police called the ISP. I've never heard the actual accusations -- so I can only speculate from what the ISP told me.
Did the ISP call me to ask what's up? No, they left me a histerical message, how they received calls from police and how they are going to terminate my account. When I returned home and called them back, the deed was done. They even removed my home directory on their server. As Bob Carp -- the pop in "moms and pops" -- later told me in numerous e-mails:
I don't think one of this "evil corporations" would've done such a thing without investigation of their own... The beauty of the "personal touch" comes with the clumsiness of it. A handmade item may be a masterpiece or a poor quality piece of junk...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I worked for one such company here in northern CO for quite a while. Most of our problems were due to USWorst's line and switches servicing the rural boondocks...which we tended to cater to. But, personal customer service was prime. People would even bring their computers in for me to fix in the office. Well, a few years ago the owners decided it was time to get out of the business. Thus we got sold off to RMI.net (now IC&C). There happened to be about a dozen ma and pa ISP's that they purchased at the same time then, and all their customers went to the new company.
"We don't want to make a mistake like we did before, so you will have all the control over your customers" came the reassurance. "We wont be meddling with your business" was another. Of course, I'd heard such phrases before and began planning my escape route. And for the short time frame, things were just like before...just the checks were signed differently.
Sure enough, it only took them 5 months before massive layoffs. All the ma and pa ISP's employees got canned (well, less than 10 employees across then all stayed...but only for the final transition period, then they were gone too) including myself. Didn't mind, already had plan in place...plus I got a nice severance.
Now in the aftermath, the customer service and technical support is lacking...due to the fact that it is centralized in another state. Also, the companies main services are to big businesses, so all the residential customers kinda get crapped on. Heck, I had a dozen or so customers actually track me down a few months after I left looking for some help.
So it goes I guess. Probably only a matter of time before they hand all their residential customers over to ATT or Juno or AOHell.
OK, I know everyone here has a million of these, but here's my Funny Support Story Involving A Phone:
I was doing network admin for a large bank in St. Louis when one day I received a voice mail. "Joe, I just *can't* get logged in. Can you come and help?" Well, this is one of the VPs and not a guy I had worked with much, so I didn't know what to expect. So I go into his office and tell him to restart his computer and login as he normally would so that I can see what's going on. He dutifully typed in his username and then goes ahead and types his all-numeric password *on the nearby touch-tone phone*. Stifiling laughter I calmly say "I don't think that's going to work, sir." Thankfully he realized his mistake without anymore prompting from me and was good-natured about it.
Thank god for end-users, or I'd be out of a job!
the no
Corporations are no different from the Mom & Pop operation - it's just people trying to make a living.
There's the same people working for both
True. I have been running a Consulting firm as a Sole Proprietor for a few years now, and am going to Incorporate in July -- trying to start my own ISP/InternetCafe. Many of my friends and myself, whom have all worked for various of the larger ISPs
it's just that one provides a living for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than just a handful.
Not true. Once I Incorporate, that does not change the number of people working for me. Some Corporations have LESS people (see Delaware and Nevada). The ones that have thousands are usually the ones that everyone hates -- including their own employees (before you disagree, reread that I used to work for them, and many of my friends still do).
The big ISP makes more money, makes more people successful, and will provide its service for less money (through the economies of scale).
That is definitely NOT true. While the Corporation DOES see more money, the average grunt tech does not see most of it. I currently make about 10 times what I did working at the ISP. And the fact of the matter is that the large ISPs push the market -- thus INCREASING the costs. Currently, DSL costs $50/month here for 128-768k. 300 miles away, in a town MUCH smaller, they get full T1 speeds over fiber for $35/month. Larger ISPs charge more because their brand allows it, thus causing everyone else to raise their price because everyone will pay it. I will probably be undercutting them by at least 50%.
Those people working for the big ISP aren't complaining - they're working shorter hours than the overstretched Mom & Pop team, and the customers are happy too - they are getting their connection cheaper.
Untrue. The techs complain. The customer support complain. The customers complain. The techs and customer support leave to start their own. And again, the prices are actually higher.
Keep in mind, I am not saying the Corps are evil -- I am in fact starting my own. I am saying that it is too common for large corps to take advantage of the smaller businesses and people BECAUSE THEY CAN. That is why people assume that corporations are evil.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Sure, some of these local yokels had personal tech support, but most had people even more incompetent than the big companies, and there's no way a small operation could afford the hardware and bandwidth redundancy of the big leagues.
It was a bad idea anyway - route a call through the phone network to somebody's basement, where they route it back to a real carrier's facility, where it actually gets on the network. Dumb. Unnecessary.
Same with having the foolish illusion that some Internet "Service" Provider is selling you broadband access. They're just pimping the telco's wires and taking a cut of the action. You're still buying the actual "service" from the phone company, only now you're paying a middleman.
And no, they don't provide any realy tech support either - if there's a problem, it's the phone company who'll have to fix it, and you can just bet where in the queue requests from "competing" companies go.
A lot of "Mom and Pop ISP's" started out as paid access bulletin boards, where they took content created on volunter/hobbyist BBS's and sold access to it. Bankruptcy couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of folks.
You could have a free market without corporations, but capitalism is predicated on one free market in particular: the capital market. Capitalism is basically corporations and governments competing for investment.
And it's kinda ironic, because we have exactly what you're talking about. Our service may not be consistent... sometimes we can't fix a problem. But we always try, and we've had people bring their computers in, we've done on-site troubleshooting (and found a few bugs in major commercial software that way). Things that our national competitors can't do (the ones in the area, anyway). Our major local competitor was bought out by a national company, and they lost a lot of customers to us. We've also received a lot of AOL refugees. We charge an arm and a leg by today's standards, but people want to use us, because they can depend on the customer service. And even while we're losing customers to Cable (that have been with us since we started... crazy), we're still signing up new customers. We don't even advertise. So I guess the national lime-light for small ISP's is over, they're not the money maker they were. But there's still a strong niche for people that don't like national impersonal services.
Everyone talks of the common person who looks for the better cheaper deal, but usually they're jaded by advertisements and corporate marketing. Granted, this is a little off topic but, I happen to be a partner of an ISP that provides Web Hosting, DSL, etc. (We're incorporated btw, but we're not a big corporation.) Like any struggling Web Host, we host porn sites. Our problem? It's hard to compete with those big corporations that offer prices per gig that are way below ours. Worst off, my favourite situation is when a customer tells us (in comparison) that he can get "unlimited transfer" for X amount of dollars. Unlimited transfer? We find that in the market for 19.95/mo customers too. That's impossible, but the common customer can't grasp that. I usually give the example that, "What if I were Yahoo! and I hosted with them, for unlimited transfer.. do you really think they'll get hosting for 19.95/mo?" Of course, that's almost comparing apples to oranges.. but it helps to get the message across. The big corporations are filling the market with pretty images/slogans that attract the customers, regardless of their quality. Some times, their speed/quality is significantly less than us Mom and Pop ISP's, but they get more customers. So what?.. Here comes my point! There are plenty of people out there who understand this, and want the *better* service, with friendly, real support. They understand the difference. And what about word of mouth? That still goes a long way in this world. My company survives in this manor, nd that's what counts. So, in conclusion, this is not the death of the Mom&Pop ISPs, but merely a beginning of a better market.
------------
Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
These small ISP's are like the leading edge of a wave. Now that broadband is available in the cities, two or three of the bigger ISP's were able to leverage DSL to stay alive, but cable modems and DSL are running the small dialups completely out of business. Out in the country, however, the small dialup companies are still around, providing a local phone number that several small towns can dial, rather than paying per-minute charges for a 800 service, or using AOL.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
The latter takes a bit more work, but if you have DSL or a cable modem, and didn't get rid of the second phone line, it can be done. With software like mgetty+sendfax, you can even justify it as a fax line. I've set up my own dial-ups under Linux before, and they could handle shell, PPP, and fax connections. If I'd had a bit more time, I would have figured out how to proxy-arp them to use fixed IPs from my /29 block instead of IP Masquerading.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I have a small isp called cal.net (they were mother.com, they changed thier name after expanding) very nice, I've NEVER goten a busy signal, when I need tech support I'm on the phone with them right away, and I even get a shell account. Compare that to AOheLl. Why do people use AOL and the like? Advertising. Most people don't want to look for a local isp when they can just load an AOL cd acd never know anything better. Small ISPs don't have nation wide access numbers. So what, unless you travle a lot it's no big deal. Personaly I won't use any ISP thet requires you to use 'speical' software.
www.nucentrix.net
fixed-point wireless broadband using mmds.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Carousel is a lie!
The biggest difference between small and large ISPs is that smaller outfits place fewer brick walls between a customer and someone that can actually answer a question thoughtfully. To a non corporate end user customer, the effective IQ of a regional/national ISP is single digits; the same 'effective IQ' of a small local ISP is probably triple digits most of the time. This does not explain everything, however. The second biggest difference is that a small ISP may not cover its operations effectively at all times (particularly on holidays, or when the one head geek is out of town on vacation.)
So in exchange for smallness and accessibility, you trade off technical coverage and expertise. The smaller ISP may actually be eager to help you, but you can sometimes hear the sound of O'Reilly books flipping furiously in the background when you ask them something outside the norm.
On customer service: regional and national ISPs appear to operate (or outsource) huge call centers literally staffed by orangutangs. With these call centers, their absolute top priority appears to be to prevent you at all cost from escalating your inquiry to someone with actual technical knowledge.
From what people in that business have told me, it appears that managements' priority at the big places is to shuck off all tech support calls with no thought, if possible. It must be a law of averages: MOST people don't need tech support, so the few customers that do (IE those with special dial up problems, etc) are considered high
maintenance and expendable. It's the only explanation that fits.
Example 1: I had been using Ohio's One.Net (a large regional ISP), which had recently become acquired by a huge national corporation. One Net had over the mid 90s developed a reputation here in Cincinnati for being an extraordinarily geek-friendly ISP. No more after the buy out. I was shopping for dial up ISDN service a while back, so I called One Net. Nobody I spoke with on the phone could tell if if One Net had a local dial up point of presence in my town. I talked with operators that didn't even know what ISDN was, that it was different either from DSL or analog dial up, etc. They might as well have had home siding telemarkerers staffing the calls.
Example 2: "The On Ramp", a regional ISP based in northern Ohio. Tried them a while back (attractive monthly rates.) Even worse than One Net. The guy I spoked with about a dial up problem appeared to be reading notes on dialer settings from a cheat sheet and was clueless when I asked him how things interacted. Dropped em after a week.
Lately, I've been through two local small town ISPs, each with probably a few hundred users. One such ISP appeared to be a local class act but had dreams of grandiosity - they got a franchise to supply cable internet to the local area, and in that aftermath I could get no help with a problem I had with their satellite based caching downlink that interfered with certain sites I visit. (Turns out the franchise has been re-awarded to another carrier since then.)
The other ISP I am currently with has in the past had a reputation for quality and service issues, but I established ISDN with them lately because it was incredibly easy (talked with the guy who did the changeover right as I was on the phone!)
So, it's a tradeoff between the benefits of large vs small businesses to the extreme... the large ISP has better resources but is stingy about allocating them to "just anyone" (read: a non corporate customer). The small ISP may not have as good coverage on some things but generally tries harder.
There are still some good bay area ISPs -- I use Raw Bandwidth, and used to use Idiom. Both are excellent, and neither attempts to compete on price.
PacBell/Southwestern Bell just bumped its pricing for residential DSL up to $59/mo from $49/mo after two years at the lower rate. The circuit itself costs $39/mo. That leaves $10/mo to pay for upstream and cross-LATA bandwidth, network hardware infrastructure, mail and web servers, call centers, office rent, marketroids, executives, service development, and support techs. For the last two years they've been losing money on every DSL customer. Pretend for a moment that you are a business person, tasked with making a profit. How much in the way of resources do you devote to customer service? What would it get you -- more customers who you can't afford?
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
In this small town, there are THREE local ISP's, all thriving. Now ours has more growth than the others, because we are the newest (five years old) and we keep up with the best equipment, have DS3 fiber connections to the phone company that the others don't have, plus we have worked hard to maintain that small town feeling. Of course, we do computer sales and service as well, plus consulting, web design, etc. The oldest one in town is owned by a local phone company that thought they could make some cash starting a tech support farm where they could provide support for other small ISPs in the region and provide 24x7 tech support by doing so. Guess what happened when they started using an automated phone system, and people had to go through several menus just to get to a human? We gained alot of customers. I truly think that markets such as smaller towns are places where mom&pops can thrive. A good example right now is the fact that AOL & Compuserve share local numbers for this area, and people have to try for literally *hours* to get online. We have had so many AOL/Compuserve switchovers in the last month, it was incredible. Big companies don't care about little markets, and people in little markets like the feeling that the smaller ISP cares about their business, and will take the extra step to help them. They like calling here and knowing the people that they are talking to. So, it really depends on the market. I would choose mom&pop any day over a national ISP, I was a customer at this one for four years, and that's how I got a job here.
I'm kinda coming in behind the curve here, but don't people see the connection between this and the Walmart phenomenon? The general trend in most areas of the economy seemingly is to get everything from one huge place that tends to have poor service, rather than getting a few things at several smaller places that have good service. It's really hard to have a big place and good service. Eventually the pendulum will shift the other way and we'll have many many mom and pop's.
Ben
I have DSL and use a separate, more expensive, local ISP for several reasons:
That said, they just merged with another independent in another state, and the effect on service is yet to be determined. They're not sucked up by a big corporation yet, but they had to get bigger to stay afloat.
> When OH When will cable modems become available in my city?!
It's fun to look in on the cable newsgroup and see how badly it sucks, then go look on the DSL newsgroup and see how badly IT sucks.
My conclusion, the grass probably isn't any greener on the other side of the cable/DSL fence. Don't jump over based on any sort of generalized hearsay, whatsoever. Before changing, talk to someone who has been using the service for a while, somewhere near your area. My cable provider has some problems, and some of their service techs may be clueless, but the service is decent enough, and they do have some good service techs, so at the moment, I'm not inclined to jump.
People talk about upstream pipes being better for DSL than for cable, but I suspect that DSL ISPs are just as capable of oversubscribing their pipes as cable.
As bad as you think Verizon is, at least the ISP and the last mile are under the same company. I'm sure there's internal fingerpointing, but one company is responsible to you, and has to resolve that. If you had a different ISP, and Verizon had the last mile, they'd point fingers at each other forever.
About the only allure of DSL to me is the more reasonable AUP - cable 'discourages' running your own servers.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
A mom and pop ISP may still profit in rural areas, provided that the free and some of the larger ISPs don't have coverage in that area. Where I live, there is one ISP competing with two local phone companies and a cable company for customers. They were able to attract customers by offering several payment options, and by offering their service at a lower rate than the phone companies. Since DSL is slowly making its way here, the phone companies may gain the advantage, but this ISP may soon offer DSL to remain in competition.
Evil is stuffing a cattle car full of people and shipping them off to a death camp. Evil is kidnapping/raping/murdering little children.
Evil is not a national ISP that buys out your local mom and pop ISP.It is nature that the big eat the small. The one thing that seperates the online/tech world from nature is that those of us who are the equivelent of Mountain Men, cutting a path through the online wilderness, will still be blazing trails even if the little camp that we founded turns into a big city. There's pleanty of unexplored territory out there.
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--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
[shameless plug]
It's the Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop, 2000-F Cheshire Bridge Rd, Atlanta. There's a Titan Comics next door, so you can spend both halves of your paycheck in one stop... :)
No, I'm just a satisfied customer; I live in Seattle now, so I can't even go there anymore. Dangit.
[/shameless plug]
--
Support your local business establishment.
If you're a Mom&Pop ISP in the right market (small town, rural), you can do very well for yourself. Until your town becomes big enough to make it onto the national players' radar screens.
Matt Barnson
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
This is actually a good idea as long as you stick to a market where you wont have a lot of competition.
:/. That aside, the ones who are still in business are ones who have taken places where AOL etc find too expensive, and have good communities under them (ie people who do appreciate them.)
The main reason a lot of mom & pop's I have dealt with have gotten bought up was that it was getting way to expensive. First a good many of your customers are pretty finicky going from one service to another on a whim. Second, you have to cover a lot of costs that are hidden to the end customer. The phone lines, modem costs, server costs, T{1,3,etc} access can eat you alive. And finally there are the legal problems when one of your customers ends up being a script kiddie. Finally the customer service is a nightmare because like most things.. you are appreciated.
A good many of the Mom and Pops I did support for from Red Hat in 1997 have been bought up. Those I have contacted have overwhelmingly been happy about it because they finally were able to spend time with their families, not deal with angry people (what do you mean my 14.4 cant do video.. I bought this new 5 years ago).
Deep down inside, I think we as customers have gotten the service we paid for
My opinion only.
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
The reason a lot of the mom&pop services existed in the first place was to recover some of the cost and justification of a high speed pipe. Before the widespread proliferation of cable and dsl, a T1 was about your best bet to get any decent speed, but very few people could afford it out of pocket. But most people have a hard time using 1% of their available bandwidth, so the other 99% goes to waste. Why not set up a small ISP to bring in revenue to pay for the line. You don't need many users paying a flat monthly rate to cover the cost of the line and then some and the subscriber base and network will still be rather managable by one or two people.
However, now that a large number of people can pick up a dsl line for less than $100 a month, the need to recover the cost is gone, as well as the need for expensive T1 lines. Thus the mom&pop services don't exist because the specific itch they used to scratch just doesn't exist anymore.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
Play with my webcams and lights here
so long as one company doesn't gain a monopoly over all ISP's then we will still have a choice.
What choices do you have for high speed service? For most people it is the cable company, period. In Canada this is a government regulated monopoly.
What bugs me is that they are allowed to bundle things like email, web hosting, news and Windows support with the service. There would be an opportunity for "mom'n'pop" to provide these services and do a better job if we were not forced to buy them from the cable company.(I have had email delayed 3 weeks by shaw@home)
Also, with "always-on" cable modems and ipv6 there is no technical reason we could not have permanent IP addresses and operate our own servers (subject to bandwith limitations). The cable monopolies will not allow this, they want you to be a passive consumer.
It's true that the smaller ISPs are being sucked up here on the West Coast, where there were probably too many of them to start with. That isn't to suggest that monolithic corporate providers are better by a longshot. Just that there was too much competition out here.
But this isn't a nationwide phenomenon. Personally, I still maintain an account with my old ISP across the country, which is still essentially a "Mom & Pop" outfit, albeit a pretty large and successful one. They provide the best service I've seen, and they still let me have a shell account, which is pretty much impossible to find these days.
In Australia, the "big 4" isps dominate the market, deciding bandwidth costs for the smaller ones, and basicall last year i was forced to leave my nice friendly isp, were they knew me by name, there was a closly nit group of people on the newsgroups and irc channels from that isp.. i was forced to leave because of the costs that they offered ($35au - for 250mb 56k VS $70au - unlimited cable - 100kb cap)...
I still look forward to the day i can come back to them (if/when they get adsl) - but im not sure they can survive much longer - with the current rate of customers leaving, and probably before long the big take overs happening in the US will come here..
im afraid, in this commercial free market economy this is bound to happen, until we have only one or two big companies in each industry, thats what is so wrong with the current economic systems, and there is nothing we can do!
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
Sigh back. But you ask a good question, so please consider this answer.
Yes, typically, most people want to have as much money as possible. But also typically, most people have other, non-financial priorities. You love someone - you give that person presents, spend time with them, etc. I love coding, and I spend at least as much time developing my apps (all freeware), as I do on my freelance paid work (which is only marginally IT-related). Result: there's lots of stuff I can't afford, like a car, say. But that's the way I like my life, see. I have other priorities than just financial gain.
Corporations, OTOH, do NOT have other priorities. They live solely for financial gain. When human beings are like that, then yep, they're getting called evil. A corporation is like a guy who'd sell his own mother into slavery if it made him a profit. And corporations do! People have their sense of what's right in ethical terms - corporations don't, so they must accountability, and laws that keep them in check.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
No one with a choice will use dialup if DSL is available. (i.e. if DSL is available and affordable to the customer)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
that took over a lot of smaller ISPs. When we took them over, the transition was not smooth. We lost a lot of customers because of increased hold time and the fact that we did not know the quirks of each little ISP. I would like to say that we still gave the customers good service, but it was still not up to par with what they had before. The company I worked for no longer cared about the small ISP customers. They just wanted to switch them over to their national dialup as soon as possible. Benefits like shell access and customized email filtering options were eliminated from the customers accounts without warning. Local dial-up numbers were shut off and the customers were now dialing into 3rd party POPS. I would guess that at least a third of the original customers were lost at each ISP we bought.
The goal of any business is providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market. I would be interested in hearing how exactly this is supposed to be evil. "Because I don't like it" isn't a valid argument: if there's no seller, there can be no buyer, and if there aren't enough buyers, then there can be no seller. That's why large corporations are dominant in the market, because they sell what buyers want.
The little guys are often making more profit per line than the big guys. No M&A charges, no big advertising budget, etc. But being big improved your access to capital, at least during 1997-2000.
Some unprofitable businesses went under, or got swallowed up by better companies. So what? Jeez, who cares if you can talk to your ISP on IRC: if it costs too much, they're going down. It's called capitalism, lUn1x boyz, wise up to it.
At the end of the day we are still the consumers paying for a service. If we are not happy with that service we can either complain, or take our money elsewhere.
The fact that smaller ISP's are being swallowed up by larger companies will reduce the amount of ISP's we have to choose from if we do decide to change ISP. But, so long as one company doesn't gain a monopoly over all ISP's then we will still have a choice. As with any company we buy goods and/or services from, it is up to us to let them know when we are not happy.
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Moderator's essentials
Damn, that really sux0rs. I just started my own ISP. And it's working out quite well so far. Small ISP's dead? I did'nt get a memo, noone sent me a fax! Hell, not even a post card for godsake! I'll be the first one to say in this discussion, your projections of jon-q-public on the internet connectionfront are sadly mistaken, DIAL-UP ISP service will always be a fraction of the cost of broadband, and beleive it or not, there is a large enough amount of users out there that just want e-mail. (and DON'T want a new one when big brother buys the farm). thats my 2tril pecos.
....move along....nothing to see here....
One of the primary reasons I switched to Linux was the access to shell on my very own machine at home. With that done, I see almost no need to have remote shell access unless I am doing CGI scripting, and even then, only in a limited way, since development now happens in a much more convenient (and safe) environment.
What's concerning to me, and one of the reasons I gave in after years of sticking by, and being forced to switch ISPs during mom & pop sellouts, is the fact that in order to get DSL or cable access, one has to pay both the wire carrier AND the ISP. Which brings out the anti-competitive worst in companies like AT&T, TW, and the Bells offering DSL. They simply price a packaged line + web/mail account at one point, say $50, and then-- knowing that no local ISP can afford to or will price their web/mail at $10-- they price the line alone at something like $40.
Throw in the idea of having to deal with the hassle of two separate companies (no matter how nice and small one might be) seems distasteful compared to simply going with the lowest common denominator. And I can't see too many reasons why I would want to pay a small ISP to be involved in my transaction at all.
I do not have a signature
it sucks to share the pipe with other people who have no restrictions on how much Porn they can download. Those 'wide open' providers are nice if you're a bandwidth hog. They suck for everybody else.
No worse than the average teenage with Napster on any broadband connection.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well we do hope that competition between huge corps might just do the trick, since we as customers prefer the larger ISPs inspite of the personalised service because of the pre-assumption that they offer quality connection due to their power to afford larger bandwith and newer technology.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I dunno. Look at Speakeasy.net in Seattle. Started as a coffee shop with a few Net terminals. Became a local ISP and grew to a couple thousand users. Signed up to resell Covad and realized they might as well do it nationally. Now highly rated, fast growing (have hired a few bozos lately because too fast growing), but mostly competent and human staff, and doing well when scams like Flashcom have gone belly up due to greed and incompetence.
The point is if you're a mom & pop and do your business straight up, and can recruit the right staff, there's no limit, you can be as big as you're comfortable with. However, while the best mom & pop is always better than a chain store, most mom & pops are worse - which is why we have the blight of chain stores. Anyone in a town with an independent hardware store which knows its business will never defect to Home Depot. But if it's a little store that's haphazardly run and stupid, national merchandising will win every time.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'm living with Verizon DSL. Nobody else serves my area at the moment (some did, but they went out of business pretty fast after Verizon started putting on the hurt.)
What I want is a pipe. Very simple. Give me always-on access that doesn't go down every morning, give me a static IP -- just one! -- and I'll be happy. They could even throw in a nameserver as a "value-added" service; I'd pay for that.
Instead I get a connection that goes down two hours a day ("some customers in Massachusetts may be experiencing difficulties" says the hold message, and tech support says the same thing and doesn't have a clue when I use words like "traceroute"), but (ooh! yippy-skippy!) it's cheap and comes with "web space" and "free web e-mail".
I don't care about Evil Big Corp vs. Mom and Pop. I don't care about Tech Support. I just want a frickin' reliable pipe with a static IP. Not a hard request. I'm willing to pay, but nobody is selling!
I'm a good customer -- simple demands, low support cost, disposable income, and infinitely loyal if you give me what I want because I'm generally too lazy to change. Companies should be jumping over each other to sell what I want. Who broke capitalism?
--G
Conventional wisdom would also dictate that one should actually read a post before he responds to it. I don't recall that my previous post was actually supposed to be about how entertaining Dennis Miller may or may not be. I know I didn't say that I watched it or had ever even seen it. I certainly wouldn't have mentioned my secret affair that I've been having with him. (We're just friends. Really.)
So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations
Evil? you gotta be kidding me you socialist freak. I keep seeing people bang on big corporations for being evil. How's a mom-n-pop shop not "evil"? Don't we all have greed? Don't we all want money? Evil... You just throw words out there expecting people to just believe you. Sigh...
I work for SpinnNet, a smaller Albuquerque NM ISP and I know that we're growing pretty quickly because the big ISPs don't care much about Albuquerque and the surrounding smaller areas. They're here and they're cheap but we get a lot of customers switching over to us since they don't get the service they want from the big guys. The only giant ISP that gets a lot of local customers here is the telco one (qwest) because they have millions of phone customers to cover the millions of dollars they lose on the ISP by being _so_ much cheaper.
:)
The reports of the death of the small ISP has been greatly exagerrated.
Yeah I know what DSL provider you're talking about....STUPID SYMPATICO USERS....time to diss up another stupid sympatico user! Here's why you and sympatico suck: 1. its a noretel-networks "meg-a-second" modem...megaBIT = like around 100kB per second...HAHAHA....i get 300kb+ regularly with @home 2. you go on about how it lets you run whatever you want....who gives a crap if your upstream cap is 12kB per second? whoa...check out my ultra elite z3r4w ftp...of course its for dialup users only cause my upstream limit sucks ass! 3. who cares about all the ip's you want for $5/mo each? i get all the ip's i want for FREE (well legally, its $10 but if anyone wants a copy of my @home account hijacker, mail me) 4. PPPoE sucks ass...it wont get better....it sucks ass....line noise sucks ass...unless you wanna but all the line filters you want for each socket in your house for only $10 each 5. best of all....sympatico has the SHITTIEST ad's ever...."we used to share the cable modem so we just bought the neighbourhood"...yeah okay there...if they had enough money to buy the neighbourhood, they might as well have gotten a REAL dedicated line...t1's less t han 1grand a month...(avg. house in to = $250k * 20 houses per neighbourhood = $5 million...enough to have t1 for the rest of your life)....on the other hand...rogers and "download rigormotis"....holy shit that's the funniest ad series EVER...(actually the "black socks" were pretty good too)
Heh. I read that article about SF ISPs being gobbled up. I got thinking, "hey, that sounds familiar, only it happened here five years ago!"
A really good article about the demise of io.org can be found here.And another version of the story is available here.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
I've been with slip.net since 94, and they certainly started mom+pop. Or more accurately, a couple guys and a Unix box.
But of course, San Francisco based ISP aren't mom+pop any more. The article was more about the midsized players finding they can't make it in a business dominated by a few huge companies.
BTW, Slip.net has always had great internet service even if a bit pricy. My only complaint is the fuckups in DSL billing, but that eventually got straightened out. Now I'm a little worried to read that First World (Slip + Sirius + WELL + god knows what) is trying to get out of the ISP game, because these were the old timers around San Francisco, and they certainly knew how to do it.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If there was a market for high quality consumer support ISPs, wouldn't there be any in an efficient market place?
Consumers want cheap bandwidth and pay nothing, right? Large ISPs have scale benefits that make them price competitive to small ISPs. Most small ISPs that I've seen are/were not making money for the hours they are/were putting into it.
In emerging markets with strong growth such as the ISP market with huge number of consumers going on-line you see a large shake-out of ISPs that are not price competitive, or they sell-out for large amount of money to a large ISP that wants their customers. Is that so strange?
Johan.
Speakeasy started out as an internet cafe in Seattle's Belltown district. You could pop in, grab a latte, sit down at a refurbished Wyse 50, and get your email and read news. An account is still $10 a month. They got big. Really big. They partnered with Covad and some dialup providers, and went nationwide. The service is still great (yeah, I have DSL, but I keep seeing things go by about how they're constantly working at improving the dialup pool, and while I was waiting for Qwest to get off their butts and get me a dry line, I used Speakeasy's dialups, which always connected at 43.3 with only a few minor hiccups... ), and you can still go down to Belltown and grab a latte and a terminal (or a PC or a Mac, for that matter).
No, I'm just another satisfied customer. I sure hope they don't ever sell... hopefully they're big enough in their own right now that they can keep going without getting swallowed.
Oh, one more thing: Their infrastructure... is all LINUX. Right here in the backyard of the Beast. (yes, they'll let you run Windows on their network... but they're very Linux-friendly. They have all the HOWTO's and magic numbers on their support pages, and they love it if you run NAT. They'll even secondary your DNS if you put up a primary on their network.)
Try not to slashdot'em too bad, folks, I'd rather not see them buried by enthusiasm... :)
Do we remember...
... that day when we met for the first time, dreaming we would start the first commercial ISP in town?
... that really we were just bandwidth junkies that wanted a T1 to play with (and that's the only reason why 90% of the geeks continued to work there)?
... that us admins and support geeks just wanted a static dialup or ISDN on Centrex?
... that we wanted unlimited shell space to use aub at Ethernet speeds?
... the horror of watching the NNRP/NNTP server console and then having to support the same person that had a fetish for farm animals or asian teen chicks the next day?
... the night we lost our one big SCSI hard drive and put it in the freezer, desperately hoping it would spin up?
... how many different ways we attempted to "organize" banks of USR Sportsters?
... how much stock we worked for instead of cash?
... how many telco techs. had to come out to install our first Internet T1 (DSL users - you just don't understand)?
... how many of us fit into our first "real" 350 square foot office - 8 or 9 wasn't it?
... how many times PacBell slammed us and wouldn't give us more phone lines?
... how many of us did tech. support from our apartments in our underwear (wait, was I the only one)?
... how many servers you can fit on a Gorilla rack?
... how we worried that AOL or AT&T or PacBell or some other behemoth would end up wiping us out?
... when we didn't offer unlimited?
... when some irate customer kept 4 voice phone lines tied up at once?
... that even a bunch of smart people never could quite make a great business (good maybe, but never quite great)?
... what torture it was every month to run the billing through?
... what a failure the soda purchase honor system was (let's see... how many cans of Dew have I had today)?
... how many small ISPs there used to be in the area -- a hundred or more wasn't it?
... how many of us were local BBS geeks?
... how we used to look at $2.50/sq. ft. high-rise office space in jeans and t-shirts with Real Estate hounds in Armani suits -- just for fun? And what kinds of dreams we used to lay out in those spaces?
... when our first Internet connection was a 56K circuit from BARRNet?
And do we remember when we all left for real jobs eventually and began the distance between ourselves and that low-paying, freewheeling mentality that is the small ISP?
those evil corporations are responsible for helping to establish the internet and for making it accessible to almost everyone (access to computers for the poor is still at issue)... and not just for the geekeesh. it's asinine to always refer to corporations as evil...even the dreaded robo-Gates has set up a foundation that is only the largest single charitable endowment ever. geezus h. christmas! you'd think that the only holy people on the earth were gnu-ers
No...it's okay...I wasn't using my Civil Liberties anyway
Since I seldom, if ever, have any service problems, I'd opt for the lower cost.
And the complete lack of accountability is great. Hell, they don't seem to care if I'm on the line for 36 hours sucking binaries from their news server.
They (Qwest) don't even bill me, as I mentioned in an earlier comment.
My ISP (IC&C Webzone) is a fairly large now corp. ISP which has knocked out a ton of competition in many of the "few" large cities in Oklahoma, they provide wonderful support and also the techs are IRC junkies... works out kind of nice, but I still wonder about all the ISP's they might of knocked out during their success....
Similar things happened in the early days of the telephone. Larger telcos got larger buying up smaller local companies. It seems that the market is rapidly changing with broadband access. I mean you used to be able to buy a bank of modems set them up in some local access calling centers (starting with only one in a city perhaps) and build from there. How do you do that when people have cable modems or DSL provided directly by the vendor providing the underlying infrastructure? This transition or it's threat would have weighed heavily on small dialup providers.
The barriers to entry seem to have grown.
Am I wrong about this? Are the days of local ISP's numbered?
Well, isn't this what happens in every industry as it grows, until everything evens out into an equilibrium. I am sure a few small ISPs will find their niche, but for the most part as the industry grows they will go away. Such is the life-cycle of an industry. I say the the fittest survives. Those companies that provide a service that the consumers are willing to pay for will live for growth of the industry.
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
I think you're forgetting that there was popular sentiment to get the fricking streetcars out of the way of traffic. Those big lugs were constantly in the way, and the rails/grooves down the middle of the road were a hazard to the low quality tires people had back then. Every motorist breathed a sigh of relief when the street cars were gone.
American cities now find themselves pitching big wads of cash down a sinkhole to fund 'mass transit' projects that almost nobody wants, and that will need heavy subsidies to keep operating when they are established. Who benefits? The eggheads at the local 'Urban Planning' think tank and a bunch of corrupt trade unions in the bulding trade.
I have a cable modem, and I work for an ASP/colocation service in NJ. I have a cable modem that has been ROCK STEADY in its service, not to mention fast. They started offering the ability to sign up for the service by teaming up with an Electronics chain store in the area. If you know what you're doing, you can buy the cable modem in the store and connect in yourself. That's convenience! There has only been one interruption in the service since I got it early last year, and that was only for one night. It turns out that someone shot a bullet into a critical cable in their fibre network, and brought the whole cable service down with it. The best part of it was that within a month, I got a snail mail letter from them explaining the outage, AND, they included a color photo printout of the cable in question! Ya gotta love that!
Support http://www.userfriendly.org We do not want Pitr, Greg and Co., to work for AOL etc.
Start out with 'On The Correct Handling Of Contradictions Among The People' by Mao Zedong.
And Josef Stalin wrote a book with the title 'Political Economy' in the 1930's. There's an English translation available at nearly any large used bookstore.
Unfortunately, as these small ISPs are bought out, the shell accounts usually are dropped. I guess I'll have to get my own T1 line in the future.
-me
I like how @Home does its system, by licencing out their name, you can end up with either a good ISP, or a bad ISP, depending on where you live. I'm lucky, I have a GREAT @Home ISP, they rock, almost uncensored newsgrounds, great anti-spam, and the download speeds rock (I can beat the living shit out of a T1 line, can we say 2MEGABYTES per second? heh:)
Sure, the upload speeds suck (15KiloBytes per second) but that's to keep the download speeds up there (once again, TWO FRIGGIN MEGABYTES PER SECOND, DAMN THAT IS FAST)
Sorry, still havn't gotten over that one download there, and it was almost two years ago!
My local @Home ISP is also nice enough to sell off static IP's for $5.95 a month, something that I hear that other @Home ISP's don't do, unforunatly.
They have outsourced their content to Excite@Home, which pretty much sucks since they aren't taking advantage of the cable modems true capabilities (I'm sorry, but 640x480 streaming video rocks, even if it does hod down a good 1000MBp/s)
Of course, the problem would be solved if all the ISP's just plain ol' fashion worked. You see, the entire Service -V.S.- Price thing wouldn't be an issue if the damn product didn't fail to begin with! Granted, with cable modems the main problem is entering numbers into windows (and the tech support people are VERY good at that let me tell you, heh, polite about it too, though some standard commisions should really standardize the laqyout of network setup box's in OS's in general, specificaly W2K is horrible for their network setup, compleatly different then Linux, NT4, and Win9x, all of which are easy to get setup for basic static IP networking.)
If the thing worked, their wouldn't be a problem. If lines didn't go down and AOL clients didn't need to be reinstalled, and if tech's actualy paid attention to the message board and noticed when the damn satalinks uplinks are down, the only tech support line that would be needed would be a basic setup help line.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
This is an issue that's hotly debated in nearly every commercial field. You could replace this headline with "Extinction of the Mom & Pop Coffee Shops?" or with "Extincting of the Mom & Pop Grocers?" or with any number of other things. In general mom & pop type stores are the first into niche markets, but once the markets become large and mainstream larger corporations become dominant, as they are able to provide service at lower costs. People always complain about this, but the truth is that the people themselves are causing it. Would you go to a family-owned grocery store and pay $1 for a tomato when you could go to the local supermarket and pay $0.70? Would you pay a mom & pop ISP $20/month for service when you can pay earthlink $10? Most people answer "no" to these questions, which is why the mom & pop businesses do not survive.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Take, for example, the Israelite King Jeconiah (Coniah), the one that God cursed in Jeremiah chapter 22. He was to never have any sons sitting upon the throne; therefore, the Messiah could never be born, as it had already been established that He was to be a son of David. Jeconiah indeed did not have any sons that became king, and neither did any of his sons nor their offspring beget a king, and so on.
A-HAH! See! There is a contradiction! Jesus couldn't be the King of the Jews, nor the Messiah!
Well, almost. The beauty of the curse upon Jeconiah is that it totally rules out the possibility of Christ having a human father, leaving only the (im)possibility of being conceived of the Holy Spirit and being born of the virgin Mary. In short, the "contradition" is really one more indicator of the wonderful thing that God did in sending His Son to earth to redeem fallen mankind. Jesus is God come in the flesh, and is not the son of Jeconiah, although He is the rightful heir to that throne (and will soon return to sit upon it).
++
Ok, I know this is off-topic. One demerit will suffice, I think...
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
FastBand ruled when they were on the Northshore up in Covington, and I had an account with them for almost a year before I went to work for them. The sysadmin and another Fastband employee (a programmer) were the ones that started our local Linux users group (http://nolug.org). They had pops in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Slidell, Hammond, Lafayette, and even a couple on the beach in Mississippi (Biloxi and Kiln, I think). A total geek place to work for their entire existence, up until the move to downtown New Orleans.
The owners got stupid and started a streaming media site (FastBand GlobalCast) with a concept of offering Hollywood-takeover content (if you wanna call it content -- none of the techs would watch the streams unless we knew the producer was coming down to our floor --- tripe, if you ask me). They set up a DJ booth on Bourbon Street (boob cams and all) and Globalcast was the reason for relocating to the city --- to be close to the booth, and to have enough office space for all the media freaks they hired. They went pre-IPO and financed their fiasco by hanging their entire operation on the perfomance of 2 stocks, I think it was. I answered the phone when the owner called me up from a bar to ask me to check to see how far the stocks had plummeted that day --- one of them was down 1/3. The isp was sold off 2 months later.
The kicker was that they sold out to the crappiest isp in Louisiana. I-55 is owned by 5 morons (well, one or two of them had a brain, but then again they did go into business with the other idiots). I talked with one of them, the guy in charge of handling their acquisitions, and this guy barely escaped dropping out of SLU (which is hard to do) and is a redneck hick like you wouldn't believe. He was a business dude who was pretending to be a technical guy, and was in way over his head.
Prior to all this, Fastband was the best isp around, and probably a quarter of their customers were from I-55 and simply could not take the crappy support and even crappier service that I-55 had.
When they did the change-over there were 4 of us in tech support (well, 5, but we didn't let him work anything but graveyard) and all we did for 2 weeks was answer calls non-stop from people angry because they couldn't log on and many were astonished when we told them that they were being sold off to I-55, and many of them hung up the phone after telling us that they going to switch to BellSouth. On the Northshore that was just about the only choice left.
Turns out that I-55 was busy elsewhere and they have managed to buy out several of the smaller ISPs in New Orleans as well, and there were other takeovers by out-of-state firms, and, as I write this, I don't know if there is a small ISP left in the city (maybe BaileyLink?).
All of this transpired in the last 7 months. I went out and signed a contract with Eatel out of Gonzales to resell their dialup, but to be honest with you, they have terrible connection problems about half the time. If anyone asks my opinion on what ISP to use, if they are friends of mine I tell them to get a BellSouth account.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
check out flexnet. ;) they offer no tech support. if you want someone to hold your hand through everything, you've signed up at the wrong isp. they rock. ;)
http://www.flex.com/
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
When I checked on higher speed access the only thing available was frame-relay that was reasonable but not practical for home ($64 /mo)use so I stick with my local dialup. I have a choice of two for $19.95 a month. I got my bill and had a late charge and just picked up the phone (could have used email) and called the Owner/manager. Told me they took off Christmas and didn't email statements and just knock off the late charge and make a quarterly payment if I wanted and they would send a hard copy each time. For dial-up access do you think anybody would switch to a big co. if the locals are available with the great customer service? I know the users on this site tend to forget that the majority of net users are going to be ordianry people who use the net for a month what some of us probably use it in two days and DSL is not really that attractive unless it comes down in price and ease of installation of modem dialup. And forget cable, unless you have a certain density of population per mile you'll never see cable. Even the high speed over copper will be a long time in coming when you are not near the central PBX.
The best way to ruin your hobby is to try to make a living at it. Waiting on the paperless office since 1997
I work for a local electronics retail outlet and we provide packets for internet access from a local ISP. I have seen the changes since I first started to today. It used to be that if we were out of the little step-by-step any goober could do it guide and disk, someone would actually spend the time on the phone with you and walk through setting up your internet access and helping you with any questions. As it changed from a small Mom and Pop operation to focusing on the bottom line that kind of help has disappeared. I hear from people getting lost in thier endless phone menus trying to even get something that resembles tech support on the phone only to be cajoled like a 3 year old by being told they absolutly NEED the guide and floppy disk. Last time I checked, most any OS on the planet ships with a dialer. And features that used to be standard are now what the call security risks... SSL, PHP, a shell, Java and such. I guess all thier customers just must want e-mail and Internet Explorer to be happy. Oh well, those are the things that you lose when it is about the money and no longer about the person on the other end of the line.
"Hollowpoints: When you care enough to send the very best."
Good comment nesta. I used to go through an ISP that let me have my domain, it was dial-up (before I went ISDN), and they not only allowed 24/hr connection, but promoted it. You had a dedicated line/modem on their end. BUT... you didn't pay 21.95.. you PAID for the service. And service you got, including the fact that if you had a tech problem or whatever, you emailed and got a response in minutes, not days, or phone calls were answered and you got fixed...NOW. The consumer bemoaning the poor service and loss of the local, dedicated, reponsive mom&pop isp and the terrible support of the huge ISP's are the same ones who want all of the above for 21.95 or even 9.95 and switch to those ISP's in an instant. It doesn't happen.. and won't happen at that price point. One just doesn't stay in business.
They're much more vulnerable to the uncertainties in the broadband market than the big boys.
My ISP, Dimensional Communications, seems to have done better than most other independent providers, at least in its limited service area (basically, the Boulder/Denver/Colorado Springs corridor and a few mountain areas). They jumped on the DSL bandwagon early, offering service from U S West/Qwest and Jato Communications (the latter primarily for business accounts).
Unfortunately, Jato tanked in December and switched off most of their DSL circuits without warning. And since some Dimensional customers used Jato because they couldn't get DSL service from Qwest, they were left without broadband access. For a big ISP, this is a minor inconvenience, since they can usually just switch a customer over to another broadband provider. For a small ISP, such a setback can be disastrous, or even fatal if they're heavily dependent on a single vendor.
They're also at the mercy of monopolistic telcos. DimCom had to threaten legal action, and in fact filed a grievance with the Public Utilities Commission, against U S West in order to get their MegaBit circuit installed. (After all, U S West/Qwest offers its own Internet access; why would it want to provide broadband to a competitor, no matter how small?) It's conceivable that telcos could just sit on service orders from indy ISPs until they wither and die on the vine.
DimCom seems to have survived, however, and their service, from the first moment I signed on (7/97) to this day, has been superb. Even though I'm stuck on a dial-up account, and could move to a provider who offers DSL in my area, service and reliability are a hell of lot more important to me than speed. And aside from the large telcos, I can't think of a single DSL provider that has good long-term survival prospects. I'd rather stick with my trusty 56K modem, and have full net access (with a shell account!), then run at 256Kbps and worry about the circuit disappearing overnight.
All hail the little guys!
Wrong.
I helped start a small non-profit isp in a rural area in about 95. We piggy backed a local college's non-profit status, payed them a bit to use their server and their modem bank, and charged $8/month for access. Shell, everything. We provided free tech support, and setup at your home for $15. Plus, classes for free. Now (I'm no longer involved much, just the ocasional input to the board, since I moved) They're up to 300+ lines for the isp end i believe, that they share with the school and they've bought the school an additional T1. We called it a FeeNet since we were non-profit but still charged to keep the leeching down. We have had a few grants also.
If I heard correctly, there's a big class action suit against Verizon right now because they're signing up more customers for DSL than they can actually handle. I finally got on yesterday (Praise Allah/Buddha/Krishna!) but it took two months of waiting and then three tech support calls Sunday morning. Grr. I didn't have any strange needs, I already had the modem and everything, all they had to do was turn it on, and that took 2 months. ??! It just kills me to see their commercials all over TV now, 'sign up today and get free this/that/whatever' and I'm thinking, okay so where's MY free shit?! :-)
/."
*sigh* At least I'm on so I don't have to stay late at the office anymore just to check my damn email.
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
If anyone in the 678/770/404 (or anyone else) would like to sit down over a cup of coffee and talk about starting an ISP to replace the Mindspring we have lost, I'd be quite interested to hear from you. In a addition to being a pressing technical need in the market, the loss is a major moral[e] blow...
Topics would include:
Former customers and employees all welcome..
Thanks,
adric@ccactus.com
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
I don't know if SoverNet does DSL, or not. But I'm 43,000 feet from my CE, so it's cable or sub-33.6 dialup for me.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Your definition of convential is askew as well. The convential one liner people use to sum up Germany's loss in WW1 would be "They lost because of being over-militarized." Rather than they lost because they weren't militarized enough. Unfortunately, society rewards mediocrity. People love being a rebel conformist rather than thinking for themselves.
This reminds me of the whole kerfuffle surrounding the Chapters/Borders/etc. incursion into independant bookselling territory. There were a lot of articles espousing the view that these 'soulless monoliths' would take away any diversity and charm lingering in the already slim-margined book business.
A year or two goes by and it seems every one of those people will pop by their local megastore to down a starbuck's and pick up their fancy UK-imported fashion magazines that they couldn't get here before. For the most part the bookselling changeover occurred without a blip, and why?
Economies of scale for the most part. I used to work for TELUS in Alberta (Canada for the george w supporters out there) and right now they're the biggest game in town. When TELUS was a crown corporation it was LAW that they support universal access to nearly every community in Alberta (this was also true of BCTel, the deregulated british columbian company that merged with TELUS later). This meant a POP in every little town in a province larger than many american states, with 80% of its population in two large metropolitan centres. The capital outlay was incredible - what mom and pop operation could afford to run wire out to Beiseker, Acme, and Flare all while being required by law to charge the SAME RATE to all customers?
If the telco/ISP market hadn't consolidated in Alberta/BC there would NOT be affordable service to these remote areas at all. Add on to the fact that a large, well-funded corporation can do a hell of a lot more with R&D and new product development (Alberta was one of the first places in the world with a commercial DSL service rollout). If the world was run by mom 'n' pop ISPs do you think anyone would have had the money to invest in the requisite infrastructure to support high speed in the first place? Not without a consolidation in the marketplace, granting enough pie to one company so that they can afford to embark on a such a venture.
That said I'm not touting the 'goods' of the 'evil' corporation. I am saying though, that if you expect a certain level of service/innovation your provider needs to have more behind it than a cottage full of helpful, hands on service personnel. In a vaguely related note, most of the innovations this community uses today came from 'evil' companies like Xerox, HP, and IBM (or at least their peace/love/dope research arms).
This has not been my experience. I don't think there would be as much whining if your statement was true. I think of this as The myth of the professional. Better products, happier employees, and better service *do not* come from the big guys. Better prices, sometimes. This isn't nostalgia, Its experience. Things go to shit when competition declines. The path from Unresponsive Big Company to Oligarchy to Monopoly is well worn, and we've all seen it happen before too many times. I do not believe in government regulation of things like this, but that is not the same as approval. I will not be going to a big ISP while there is one small, responsive one left standing. If you measure success only by the size of the company you own/work for you will make the world a worse place because of it, and be less likely to succeed yourself.
The biggest reason is the cost of the new technology and the phone company monopoly so they don't have to and won't provide anything approaching fair access unless you have $1M in lawyers sueing them all the time. I used to own an ISP and every change in technology from 14.4 to 28.8 to 33.6 to 56K was a big increase in costs and often the costs would occur before you made any profit on the previous technology upgrade. Now theres v.92 for modems. The maker of th eV.90 modems I have has discontinued the equipment, all they are doing is repair and that only for a couple more years. Personally, I'm planning on filtering my personal machine to bounce any email from any rboc/ilec as well as aol and time-warner.
So one day I get asked to call this one group and give them a hand setting up their email. And it's a group for the blind. Fortunately they had a sighted volunteer there, though, so I talked to him. Unfortunately, he was...um..."developmentally challenged"...and this group had just moved into new offices, and the computer desk wasn't completely set up yet (let alone anything else in the office by the sound of it).
I was trying to talk this guy through setting his DNS servers in Win95, and it was painful. It took 1h40m -- no lie -- and the conversation was full exchanges like this:
Me: Okay, now move the mouse over to the window that's just popped up.
Him: [strange grunting sounds, lasting a full minute] Uh...okay.
Me: [switch back from reading Slashdot] Okay, now look for the button that says "Properties".
Him: [strange grunting noises, and the sound of the mouse moving against his pants...the desk isn't set up yet, remember]
Me: [bored] Have you found it yet?
Him: [strange grunting noises that last a full minute] Um...what?
I got him to put in one DNS number; after that I just gave up. I think it worked, though...
Carousel is a lie!
We sold our dialups last month to a company in Minneapolis called 'Infinetivity'. The lack of customer support, and amount of down/hold time is astounding. I called them this morning, to find out for one of my old customers, why I could gain shell access, but not use a mail client(obvious POP server problems) they said "we've been down since yesterday, and we have two people on it". This is hilarious since he was surprised to find out that I could get mail through elm/telnet!
Not only are these large companyies horrible with customers, they are generally not knowledgeable about what they offer. (their main sysadmin is on vacation - he knows what's going on).
I hate to rip, but these guys are just crooks.
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
In Central Florida we had a thriving Mom & Pop ISP business. With ISP's like InternetU (www.iu.net), Florida Online (www.digital.net), Metrolink (www.metrolink.net) and Palm Net (www.palmnet.com). Now they've all been bought by either OneMain (www.onemain.com), Duro Communications (www.mpi.net), or gone out of business. The result? Most of my customers have had to go to other national ISP's because of downtime and poor support for ISP issues.
For a while Duro (mpi.net) was the number 2 largest source for spam on the net after UU.NET and they are only a regional ISP. I miss working with locals since they would generally help you support products like Linux or *BSD instead of the knee-jerk helpdesk at BellSouth that blames all their problems on the client. I don't know that I'd characterize the sell out as 'evil', but it sure does suck for me now.
My God! It's full of Voids!
Now I wake up this morning and see its been accepted. This is so irritating. How does one person at Slashdot reject a story, only to have another one approve it.
I think from now on I'm going to submit stories several times. If one person turns it down, I'm sure one of the other editors will approve it.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Quoted from article.
These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC.
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
I'll bet that BasinNet is also the sort of ISP that will give you a shell account.
Love to see that at AOL. Can you imagine the average AOL user accidentally hitting the (non-existent) "Shell Prompt" button on NEW! AOL 6.0! SO EASY TO USE, NO WONDER IT'S #1!. Meltdown.
We're losing all the ISPs that don't pander to the lowest common denominator.
There is light on the horizon, however: how about a Toronto-area DSL provider that charges $34.95/mo for residential 1.2Mbps DSL, and will give you as many static IPs as you want for $5/mo more each... :)
They allow you to run whatever servers you want at home. Mail, DNS, web, etc.
Their customer service sucks, yeah, it's PPPoE, and yeah, their reliability was very poor when I started with them in June. But it's been getting gradually better.
www.dsl.ca
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
i've had two Mom and Pop ISP and quite frankly they are usually the only ones that will supply a shell account along with their numerous other options (wireless DSL included). the one i'm currently with had a story written about them on this matter.
icis machine
I used to work at a local ISP in missouri. Hardly a day would pass that the owners wouldn't get offers from larger companies to buy them out. The reason our guys didn't sell was simple: they actually gave a shit about the customer. That, even in many mom and pop operations, is still a rare commodity.
;-)
My experience, however, is not simply limited to tech support for the greater missouri area. I also had the displeasure of working for a national provider (rhymes with AOHell
The biggest difference between the two was personal accountability. When you work for an ISP that only has something like 10,000 customers, you can't afford to treat a single customer like shit. These people wind up calling back often (we all know the type of people who can't be pleased, or are dumb as rocks), and if you provide crappy service to a person in a small town, half the time you risk losing all customers in that town - i've seen it happen. At AOHell, it didn't matter. hell, AOL employs more tech support workers than that local ISP had customers. It didn't matter if you were a dick about something, the odds were strongly in your favor that the customer would never speak with you again, and %99.9 of them never even remembered the first name of the tech they spoke with. There was no personal accountability.
On the other side, there was also a question (very prominent these days) about legal procedings. There was only so much we were allowed to do when working for AOHell. Anything that wasn't explicitly supported was an absolute no-no. I worked in the windows side of the house, so troubleshooting even the simplest mac problems, or even a simple *nix question was forbidden. If i was talking to a customer who needed a CD and it came to light that they lived less than a mile from my call center, it was, of course, absolutely off-limits for them to come down and get one from us, much less even be told where our call center was specifically located. The local ISP i used to work for? We kept a store-front office for just such purposes. People would come down and drop off their bill, or even come buy to pick up install diskettes. Local dialups are allowed to play it much more loose because of the likelihood of getting sued. Just as you are required to know the customer, the customer knows you. A sort of mock-friendship evolves, and you don't have to worry about it. Places like AOL have never seen a day without some pissed off customer who got called an asshole by a tech suing them for everything they can get their grubby little hands on. The bigger the target, the greater the likelihood of getting sued, the greater the protections that must be put in place.
The bottom line is this: National ISP's don't know or care about the customer because A)they can't, and B) they're not expected to. There's a huge difference between talkin' to some woman named Yolanda in Batton Rouge that you know you'll never speak to again, and talking to Aunt May from down the street who you'll probably see the next time you go to the grocery store.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I'd like it if both of you could prove your arguments, please -- or at least show that you're not pulling it out of your ass.
Carousel is a lie!
It seems like shell access is an endangered species, as ISPs prefer lower maintenance web / email only type of accounts.
One of my shell ISPs, panix.com , recently picked up a lot of ex-netcom users once that ISP dropped shell access.
A message from our sponsor
The article mentions a record label who had no backup of its web content, audio files, etc.
I can understand counting on one's web host to backup its servers' data, and it's outrageous that a web host would both (a) not do regular backups and (b) not explain that fact to its customers. On the other hand, most people would never trust a third party to maintain the only copies of their data, for precisely these reasons.
Does every person on the planet have to learn the same lesson the hard way?
Dave
Even with AOL-TW-Netscape-MS promising to sell ISP's access to their cable, how long will it be before the local ISP's are rendered irrelavent? This doesn't seem as big a problem in metro areas as it is in the boonies. It looks like a big re-shuffle is going to take place in the whole business...
Businesses try to take market share leading to customer service being pushed aside. As customers we all have to make it a priority to push larger corporations to improve their customer service.
What I've found that works:
Most importantly don't back down. The people answering the phones can't make policy, but their job description generally allows them to pass the buck to a supervisor. Eventually you annoy enough people up the chain of command that changes occur. If bad customer service stats build up, higher ups will have to start listening.
"
Is there still room for the small-time ISP in today's market or has dial-up internet become solely the realm of big-time providers?
"
My ISP (Kotiverkko Yhdestys, or Domenstic Network Association)in Espoonlahti, Finland, has no more than about 80 members. In order to avoid tax issues, it's an 'association' and is not allowed to make a profit. I pay the telco twice as much as the ISP despite the fact the ISP provides the IP infrastructure, yet the telco only provides 4 copper-copper conections, which took 5 minutes to set up, and no maintainance. I have to provide my own modems and router, but they're quite cheap ($500 for 2Mb/s modems)
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
The ISPs mentioned in the article, or at least those I'd heard of such as Slip.net, Hooked.net, Creative.net, Concentric, Best, are not what I would call "Mom & Pop" operations. A "Mom & Pop" operation (even though there's no Mom in this case) is something like my ISP, ihwy.com, a small ISP in the Santa Cruz mountains. He (not "they") has maybe a thousand subscribers on a dual T1. You can indeed turn a profit on an operation like this. Not a handsome profit, and you're not going to get rich with it, but you can make a descent living. And the customer service can't be beat, which is to be expected when you live across the street from the guy.
And the brethren went away edified.
Research the fight against the 'Hiawatha Corridor' light rail line in Minneapolis for reference material regarding my second point.
And there are dreamy-eyed nostalgic books about streetcars in about any good bookstore. Mostly written by people who weren't around then.
I've had a shell account with xs4all from the very beginning when the name was hacktic. In 1998 they sold out to the evil local telecom giant KPN. Almost three years later it's still a quality ISP and if I need to get hold of a techie or even the CTO I can usually find them on IRC. If not, I can email them and they'll respond fairly quickly.
2 Cow Herd was the first full-spectrum ISP in the Venice, CA area...an area which (along with Santa Monica) later became so crowded with Internet firms the region became known as The Digital Coast.
Last year The Herd sold out to a bigger company called SOHO Central. I still have my 2cowherd.net email address but it's administered by SOHO Central now. We had some great customers and I built websites for some nice people. It was a great ride.
Bandwidth is now becoming a commodity rather than a service business. I suppose economies of scale make it easier for Uber-companies like ClamLink...oops...EarthLink and AT&T Worldnet and so on and so on to undercut the small ISP's prices.
But as far as I'm concerned, until the last human-scaled ISP breathes its last and the ISP business goes 100% corporate I will seek out and patronize small ISPs and web hosts. And you all should too. You will have a better experience, better accountability, and better service. It might not be the cheapest way to go, but you won't regret it.
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- All your estrogen are belong to us!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I have Rhythms at home, work, and a work branch office. All connections are 95% reliable and damn zippy. What complaints do you have? Perhaps I can be of help..
I think RTHM, out of all the DSL providers, has simply the best network.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
When I moved here, I looked all over the city for a small, local, geek-owned-and-operated ISP (one likes to do business with one's own in these matters). I found one (The Connection), which was a very small, new company. The problem with the market here where I live is that most of the small ISPs have been bought out, and everyone wants to get online. ISPs here will actually refuse to sign you up if you don't want to pay by credit card, f'rinstance...
Anyway, not two months later, my ISP service goes completely down. I can't even connect; one line is busied out, the other one says "The number you have reached is not in service...". No warning, no nothing. Four days later service comes back, and I discover to my horror that Connection has been bought out by a huge conglom. So now instead of tech support Rhys-with-the-cute-voice, I have to deal with some ditzy women who sound perpetually stoned, don't know what they're talking about, and assume that the person on the other end knows even less; a payment plan that assumes credit cards (when I signed up, I walked into Connection's office with cash in hand--I have no credit card) -- paying for my next subscrip is going to be interesting -- and service that is prone to sluggardliness, busy signals, sudden disconnection, and losing e-mail.
Why? Because small ISPs make money hand over fist here and therefore become profitable targets for large conglomerations in takeovers.
Sigh...
?!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I had no idea the Mom&Pop ISP's were dying. My parents have been using the same local ISP for nearly a decade now, and they seem to be doing quite well. I myself have been using the same ISP since moving out 5 years ago, and have been quite pleased with the service. I don't require much in the user-support area, but the supply of a shell account, solid uptime, and a goodly array of available ISP-side newsgroups where discussion (or just general blather) on a good many subjects both technical and social are fairly active. These ISPs seem to be doing well for themselves, being able to afford regular hardware upgrades. I can't imagine ever NOT going with a local ISP.
--
Xiphos
No, most people listen to the emotive propoganda and say "Gemany deserved to lose because they were evil." In short, 'conventional wisdom' is whatever gets you through your day without having to confront what the tv tells you or what the neighbours are buying. People don't think about the mechanics of a situation, they just pick the easiest line for them to take to dismiss rational, involved thought. Like listening to the guy with the excuse for global warming based on a "climate scare" he heard about when he was a kid, or the Oil company's scientists who say they have "conclusive new evidence" which suggests climate trends may be due to noral solar cycles.
Conventional wisdom says that with a bigger corporation, you should get a more reliable service. This isn't any more true with large ISPs than small, and the huge number of tradeoffs you sell to buy this "service" like tech support, low wait times etc are the things they don't advertise. Conventional wisdom is normally what your favourite news show tells you and what your favourite idiot radio jock is playing. People who use AOL actually ask if you have "AOL" rather than Internet access. They've been sold an idea of a product and they like it that way. Less choice, less thought.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Some mom and pop places are eating up their cousins and other siblings to stay alive and grow...I used to work for Fibernet. Check out the top bullet on the news at their front page. They just acquired someone else's user base. The ma's and pa's have to get big enough that they are hard enough to move off the block...That makes them less ma and pa'ish and also eliminates aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
I think the small ISPs are great if you *do* want to talk directly to the people involved running the show, but having worked at one I know that even if you can talk to them, doesn't mean they're always going to solve your problem. When you are small people expect to be able to talk to the head Sysadmin. But when you're the size of Mindspring you know you don't have a chance.
Personally, I think the small ISPs are great if you want a BBS feel to your experience. But when you want great service and connectivity, I'd rather go with a company who's trying to run the show like the phone company. When you call, you may not get answers, but you only end up calling with a problem every 8 months. This isn't the case with the small ISPs.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
My former ISP was one of the first local ISPs in my area and they have survived to this day, but only because they have remained competitive. I was one of the early customers and my ISP's bandwidth consisted of about 3 T-1s. Today they have several T-3s with a connection well over 100mbit. With only about 50% bandwidth usage they provide many buisnesses in the area with their bandwidth and are one of the biggest DSL providers here.
At the advent of DSL, my ISP was the first to locally provide DSL service (other than GTE). Having the most bandwidth in my city makes them the main ISP to buisnesses and the largest local DSL provider. I now use cable provided by @home because unfortunately DSL hasn't quite reached my neighborhood. After only one month of usage I can not believe the terrible service (slow connects, mail servers down) and the poor quality of their customer support. It really makes me miss my old ISP and I am ready to switch to DSL as soon as it is available.
I know most of my old ISP admins. Hell, I've been down to my ISP several times to do things such as buy some cheap CAT-5 for my network. I still talk to them regularly on IRC.
The key to their survival is simply because they can provide a better service than national ISPs. They never have any hold times and their admins know the service well so they can provide excelent customer support. They have more bandwidth than the phone company does here and can provide a better DSL service than the phone company.
Gelson's is conveniently located in various upscale parts of the Los Angeles area.
Bristol Farms is great, too, but unfortunately I don't have one nearby.
D
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If you live in the DC area there's patriot.net. It's a small isp but it does have shell hosting for dialup. Mostly the problem with small isps is that they offer more services that most people don't use and then have to charge customers more because they are a small business and need to stay profitable. When some one first signs up with an isp all they look at is price, they figure that service is the same.
Whenever the "barriers to entry" (i.e. initial fixed costs) of running a business are low, then many people go into business and compete with each other. Due to this competition (competition==good thing), profits become lower and lower. Finally, the razor thin profit margins means that only a large corporation can make any substantial profits, driving the smaller companies out of business.
The same thing will happen with online shops. The larger shops, perhaps one with brick and mortar counter-parts will eventually squeeze out the little shops. This is because etailing has some of the lowest barriers to entry that I've seen.
Moral of the story? Don't feel bad about it. It's inevitable that we will all play our roles as consumers, which causes this whole thing to happen. Since the internet is still a relatively 'new' business medium, these little kinks have yet to be worked out.
Keeping
By nesting the messages too deep?
Somehow I doubt it.
My bet is that Cowboy Neal and Roblimo are reading this and laughing their asses off and wondering how long you'll keep this going before you get bored with it.
NetScrape, now, you'll probably break _that_....
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
to make money.
Usually, one good way to do this is "providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market."
But you can often make more money, more easily, by buying up the competition, or running it out of business, then essentially force the consumers to buy your product. Your 'limiting price' then is no longer set by competition, but rather by the barrier of entry cost for someone else to become competition. This is usually a much higher number.
Alternatively, you can keep the price static, and reduce the product. (ie: cut your service) It amounts to pretty much the same thing.
We still have a local ISP here in Vermont, SoverNet. We used to have another local ISP, Together Net, which was bought by OneMain, which was bought by EarthLink. Unfortunately, in order for me to get Bandwidth, SoverNet was not an option, so I'm with an evil corporation.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
and you lose indications of which messages are replies to which.
This is admittedly better than indenting out the right side of the window....
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
my own experience was working with a smallish vancouver business-oriented isp; we catered to the business community with customised services and solutions. i was the `solutions department', i.e. programmer. though, this being a small isp, of course i started off doing tech support. ;)
over a year ago the company was bought out by one of our customers, who wanted to build an isp facet to their business. from the start, the new management was indifferent at best. they were obviously intent on becoming a large corporation, and that focus was all wrong for the way we (the original isp) did business. however, we managed to remain mostly autonomous for quite a while, and things were not bad.
then, another isp - based in ontario - that the parent company had also bought out, started taking over our operations, and in fact the president of that company became president of the parent. at that point, things began *very* rapidly going downhill. this was a larger provider who had built their own business with a commodity approach.. which they immediately tried to force on us. they offer packages, and nothing outside of packages. and to tell the truth, the packages are not very good; i was unable to get most of the sites i'd worked on, with any kind of complexity to them, to work on the new isp's servers.
now all the technical staff has left. i left specifically because the commodity isp had literally no idea what to do with me; my forte is custom solutions and i just didn't fit their modus operandi. i also left for the same other reasons as everyone else, which boils down to the fact that we were unable to keep customers happy in light of what was going on, and we had no resources to draw on to make things happen, as no one at the new parent company ever seemed to listen to us *at all*. it's incredibly discouraging to work in that sort of environment; also, to be someone who cares about whether or not the customer's needs are met, and to be totally incapable of seeing to that.
and now, all their customers with any sort of needs above the extremely basic are running out the door. they're unable to get any sort of support. before i left, i talked to one of the managers of the original parent company, who even *stated* baldly that they didn't mind losing the customers who didn't fit into the new scheme.
this, to me, is the corporate (or, corporate wannabe) experience. now i do everything i can to avoid it. i think we as a society *need* to learn the limitations of corporatisation, and we need to learn them *soon*. i've been an avid reader of science fiction all my life, and one theme that's been pretty prevalent in many novels and stories is that of the future mega-corporations that control everyday life. with that background reading, current developments take on a very sinister tinge. it saddens me that most of the world seems simply to accept that's going on.
Same happened in Australia with AOL..
They promised all beta users 3 months of free subscription. After the 1st month they told us we would have to PAY for the other 2 months at a discounted rate. There service, speed and reliability is about dead worst in Australia and there tech support is non existant.
The worst part was having to reformat my computer to get rid of AOHELL!
And get this, previous to that, I worked at the Big Evil One. That's right, AOL. So I guess I've had the pleasure of doing both. The actual knowledge and support level is the same, however at the local ISP we get to do customer callbacks, keep in touch, etc, while at AOL there is no such thing. At AOL, someone would call up and ask for Bob. I would say, "Bob in Tucson, Bob in Ogden, or Bob in Florida?" At the Local ISP, when they call for Bob, they get Bob. Some people like this, others don't care. However, we are $4 cheaper than AOL and provide everything from web hosting, T1, server co-location, etc etc. Try getting a full pipe with AOL.
In terms of the previous post about the underlying infrastructure providing cheaper service, this is true. Our main competitor to DSL sales is PacBell herself. She can offer it cheaper, but the service is cheaper. PB uses PPPoe and/or DHCP, almost like a modem pool, while we assign everyone a static, public (or private if they choose) IP.
The funny thing is, whenever someone calls in and says "well PB is cheaper by $x amount," they don't understand the tech side of it and go towards PB. The kicker: a large percentage of our DSL sales come from ex-PB customers who had to wait 4 months for an install or 1 hour on hold to change their password. They say "why didn't anyone tell me, they're terrible!" and I hold my breath thinking "We told you so." There's complete domains and websites dedicated to PB horror stories.
And one last thing. Our company president who started this company did it all himself from a closet, like many start-ups. The cool thing is, he actually knows all about ISDN problems and occasionally helps us down here in tech. I remember the last time I was having trouble with an ISDN customer and she started getting bitchy. After putting her on hold for a minute or two (I swear!) I told her "ok, our company president is looking into this personally and logging into the router now."
Dead silence...
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
To those still out there.. keep up the good work. Man i miss those days, when you could dialup and be www.ereet.com or whatever the hell else you wanted to be with static ip :)
Those were the good days..
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
I started an ISP in Michigan 3 years ago. It's has been a battle from the start but has gotten easer this past year. No one has offer to buy me out yet and I could care less. We offer a great service to our customers and have a solid customer base. The Telco's make it tuff for us but we have learned to work with and around them. I don't want to be like AOL or any other large ISP. I don't see any ISP as compitition. It's a great thing to have choices! No one ISP can serve all!
my company IS a small mom-and-pop ISP, we haven't been taken over yet, but we'd probably be better off if we were. we compete with the phone company here, which up until a few years ago, was a complete monopoly (this is in new brunswick, canada btw). we were actually competing well until they phone company started rolling out DSL, now everyone is jumping ship for high speed (including me and my dial-in account is free!). not only that, but of all the irony, we have to buy our own lines from the phone company! I don't know if it's fair, but i guess that's business.
my mom-and-pop ISP company website:
notthephonecompany.com
echo $wittysigline;
In one weeks time I am forced to loose some thing that i have had for almost ten years. My email address, some thing that has never changed since the first time i was on the 'net'. Whilst most of you have experianced this before I hadnt. So I thought How do I get a email account that I wont have to change ever again? hmmm I hate web based email so hotmail et al aint going to do it. How about I ring some ISP's and ask them how much it will cost. After ringing them I found that none of the major players would stoop to selling some thing so droll as just an email account. So I ran a small isp that I they went through every thing I needed to do to set up an email service for me. I dont think they will all die out not whilst they provide services that I cant buy any where else
I used to work for the smallest ISP (employee wise) in connecticut: iconn.net. With 5 people (on a good day) the staff was small to say the least. But everyone knew their job, and usually part of someone elses. Customer Service was good, most of the customers knew the staff by name if they called much. Network equipment was first-class, servers were Linux based and rock solid. We gave customers fair expectation of what they would get for their money, and I think most people on ICONN were getting a really good value. Today it's even easier to start a small ISP. The telco's are forced to work with you more, standards are in place for services, and software exists to support your business. We're not in the wild-wild-west of 1994 anymore. I for one would always rather be connected to a small ISP, where my connection matters to them. Even large ISPs (such as my new job) have heart. I'm trying to start the same vibe here among the techs and admins (the suits will never get it). Long-Live the small ISP!
FWIW, the only reason I use a "BIG ISP" is because I do a fair amount of overnight travel and can't afford to be "out of touch" with my email. Plus it gives me something to keep me busy in those long nights in a hotel room...
That said, my travel requirements have been quite low of late and I am considering going back to a "regional" ISP. Then again, I am also considering STARTING my own ISP (I am already doing web hosting). I strongly prefer a regional because you simply get better service and response. Regionals are willing to learn new things (like how to support Linux), where the BIG ISP's are all too willing to give the old standby - "Sorry, but we don't support that."
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Within the last year, my (soon to be former) ISP of 9 years was bought out by OneMain who then was bought out by Earthlink. Over the course of the months that followed the OneMain buyout, there was many, many, many assurances that none of the services were going to change, that only the improvement of customer support as they switch to a 24/7 support structure.
Well, many months later, they finally get around to moving the servers from the local systems to the OneMain systems. Now, they're cutting down on services being offered, including the one main service that I had been using for the last 9 years--shell access. Of course they're blaiming it on Earthlink's policies, but when they migrated servers, suddenly mail access via shell (which I was counting on with all the international travel I do) had been cut off, leading me to believe that it was a planned move.
It's my belief that soon it'll just be big companies that provide nothing beyond dialup/DSL connections, email (funny how you can get accounts with 10's of email addresses these days), some webspace, and, like in the case of AOL, a community of sorts in chatrooms and games and such. Seems like we're sliding back to the days before the Internet was big where everyone who was 'connected' were on AOL, Compuserv, etc.
Just my 2 bits (that plus 6 more will get you a byte).
Grei
My company is a small IPP and my partners and I have bemoaned the way our industry is getting tacky. We do what we do because we enjoy it. Fortunately we can also make a living doing it, so we feel blessed, however much of our competition tries to stuff as many users on a box as possible and provide a meager FAQ as support. I'll admit up front that less interaction with clients usually results in better margins, but that seems to be a really shallow business model.
So, what do we do about this? Aside from everyone hosting with my company (just kidding), I think that we should support local and small businesses of all sorts. If personal service matters to you, be willing to pay a 10-15% premium for it. Someone out there is willing to sacrifice your peace of mind for a buck, but in my opinion it is a poor trade. Of course, when doing business with smaller organizations you should be prepared to ask plenty of questions to make sure their service is right for you, but then this is what I would recommend for doing business with any sized organization.
While on this topic, if you are shopping around for an ISP or IPP the best way to judge their level of service is to send a sales question to their support email. If you don't get a response then you can assume their support people are understaffed and didn't want to pass along the request to sales, thereby increasing their load. If you get a reply, and better yet a prompt one, you can assume that support is well staffed and cared for.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I still work for a local ISP that's been around since 95. It's a great place to work and a great place to have an account. Over the years I've seen the other small isp's fold, merge, or get sold out. Some seem to happen repeatedly. For instance. techlink.com was bought out by meta3.com whick was bought out by ayrix.net which was bought out by bignetsouth.net. Now I hear bignet is getting bought out. These Isp's seem to be trying to get too big too fast. They expect merging to help, but I think they just end up buying into another isp's dept and crappy equiptment that has to be merged. Bignet is still running techlinks old 14.4 modem racks in some areas of mississippi. Obviously no one wants that. I even remember when cruisenet went out of business they didn't tell half of there customers. Suddenly no one could connect. For about a week we were flooded with calls from angry customers that wanted a new account with us because they couldn't connect or even get anyone on the phone at cruisenet. Little did they know cruisenet went under.
:).
The company I work for is NETDOOR. We've managed to survive, and just opened our own colocation making us the only local isp in MS to have one. People still enjoy good service, we have our own techs (no one is subletted). The president of the company is not only an incredible business exec, but a great admin as well along with the other talented admins.
So far NETDOOR has had a few offers to sell, but none have been accepted. I think we have survived and grown due to our service and equiptment. We have 3 backbones through UUNET Cable and Wireless and Sprint. Plenty of redundancy and extra equitment. So if something breaks there is a backup. These are the things that make us the best
The article said it in a nutshell why these isp's die. They wanted to be like AOL. I don't think it's a good idea to try to get that big. The odds are definitly against you. I've seen far to many companies try to get too big to fast. From what I understand NETDOOR doesn't even plan on trying to expand out of Mississippi.
It's sad to see these ISP's shrivil up and die, but I think in the end there will still be a few left. Maybe the customers from these dead isp's will help keep the others profittable by moving to "mom and pop" isp's that have a chance. ISP darwinism.
I know why the small isp are dieing. Its DSL . I have talked to so many company offering to allow me to resell it to my customers and the price they give me is outrageous. SBC for example said ican resell a 128/768k pipe for 37$ from them with a 1 year contract . For me to turn a profit I have to mark that up to 45 to 50 Dollars because you have to buy a t1 from ameritech to go threw them other company are worse. Covad Wants I think it was 40$ for a pipe to resell but they sell the same pipe for like 2 dollars more or someting ludicris like that. This is why the small isp is dieing . We just cant compete with the big guys when it comes to high speed. Bill Hatzer Systems Administrator
Since nobody else has yet, I feel obligated to plug sonic.net, my favorite local ISP. They've grown to provide service to much of northern california now, but still have the charm of a local. They've got great support, cool website member tools, and a well-stocked shell. They're also crazy fast. I'm quite pleased.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
After things settle down, the suits will look at how profitable it is to own a dinky ISP out in the middle of nowhere. And then sell it back to some Mom and Pop.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Why is there no political pressure to force political parties to promise to provide - or ensure there is a choice - of public transport?
Is there no will for this in the states - is it considered `socialist`? or what?
For internet service which is a public good, check out the town of , which offers net access for a minimum fee ($5.15 per month).
They even have wireless access downtown.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
He talked about the growth of large banks and other financial institutions. I asked him if he thought they would continue to grow, and become huge global entities with fingers everywhere. He said they would. I bemoaned the fact that I would rather bank with a smaller bank and get the attention a customer should have, as opposed to a large bank where I have to pay to talk to a teller.
He said that while the large banks would be everywhere, that this would give rise to smaller community banks that would service the needs of the local populations. Those banks would be cheaper and less selective on who they let bank with them. They would be the alternatives to the large banks. He also stated that he thought the communities would gravitate more to those smaller banks for day to day needs, while going to the larger banks for longer term needs. This was his vision.
I think the same holds true for these mom and pop ISPs. I don't think they will go away. They won't be as numerous as before, but they will be there, servicing the local community they are a part of.
So, to answer your question: No. They will be there. And just as servicable. Not as numerous, but they won't disappear from the earth.
press [any] key to contine...
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
You dont want to r3w7 nasa from home stupid!
Besides, where are you going to store your 31337 warez ?!?
I work for a car dealer. We have a T1 and a real nice linux box. The dealers primary goal is to host his web site in house and provide high speed access to his employees. Thats just about done. Our next step is to pick up a portmaster and give our customers free isp service along with a free first oil change when they buy a car. We will be able to keep people informed about recalls and service reminders. Many medium bussnes have already spent the money on bandwidth and servers, it's easy to give it back for little or no cost.
Instead what we have are laws that go against this philosophy:
- No Internet taxes. This might have been a good idea in 1996, but it's time to seriously consider changing this philosophy, especially when there are atoms invovled, such as ISP hookups and mail-order products. I agree that taxes on intellectual property micropayments still don't make sense.
- No bartering. If your spouse sets up an ISP, you can sign up tax-free, but if your neighbor does, there are taxes. That's a steep taxation curve when looked at from the perspective of taxes based on distance! This is one of many barriers to formation of small businesses that serve local communities (the other main one being the sheer amount of paperwork).
Choose your poison: AOL or Internet taxes. Or are we just going to hope for Judge Jackson in shining armor?It was inevitable that the ISP's that we had during the late 80's and most of the 90's would be eliminated once high speed became a reality. If my ISP had adjusted their web hosting rates to come to terms with this new reality I probably would have used their service. Fact is, they didn't. I could host a domain for 25 bucks yew ess in the states but these guys wanted upwards of one hundred bucks a month to properly host the domain. Morons.
Anyway, they were losing their best admins and the pinhead who ended up holding the fort had no clue what he was doing and after the second crack in so many months I'd had enough with their 'service'.
Good riddance.
:wq
I love reading on /. how the "evil" corporations are taking over the ISP market. Hello? The ISP market sucks...the profit margins are next to nothing so pooling resources is a must...for anyone who doesn't now what that means...it's called "economies of scale." Don't get me wrong, the technical know-how on this site is probally the best, but when it comes to business 101, most would get a failing grade. Take a course in Strategic Management and then we will talk.
Lanminds
:) What more could a geek want?
Unfortunately, they're one of the few remaining in the bay area. However, they've been around for about 8 years now AFAIK, and they show no sign of being bought out. I have DSL service through them, and I have to say that their service is excellent. It doesn't go down every couple of days like PacBell's does (shudder), and when you call their number and ask for support, I've NEVER failed to get a Human Bean. Plus, they offer free shell access
A small ISP that just offers a dial-up connection doesn't have the resources to compete with AOL and MSN and others. To succeed, an ISP needs to offer more than that - good deals on DSL/broadband, shell accounts, specialized content, whatever and they need to target a niche market and develop loyal customers who will not leave them for AOL. A Mom-and-Pop ISP isn't ripe for a takeover by a big ISP until a good number of their customers have actually left for other ISPs.
The ISP I use for shell access and e-mail (but not for actual connectivity right now) is New York City's Panix The rates are excellent and they're the best ISP I've ever used, so I recommend them if you're in the NYC area and need an ISP (or if you're elsewhere and need a reliable e-mail account and support staff that actually know what Unix is).Capitalism does not necessarily imply corporations. You can have the benefits of capitalism without creating legal, ficticious "people" who have all the rights of a person and none of the restrictions.
I do respect success. I (heart) Wal Mart. I would never buy computer stuff there, but that's irrelevant. I (heart) Wal Mart for having a thousand things I need in one place. But I miss being able to give the finger to the big ISPs (esp. A-Oh-Hell, of course) and dial up to the guy down the street. *sniff for nostalgia* Those were the days...
------------------- A life? Cool! Where can I download one of those?
While you can sit around and gripe, the other option is to get togetther with a few of your friends, and start your own service.
While this may seem a bit outrageous, it is not that impractical. The Register has this story about Laramie, Wyoming, where they run their own non-profit community wireless Internet service called Lariat (Laramie Internet Access and Telecommunications). It includes high-speed Net access service for a fraction of the price of most services in the US.
The initial cost was about $3,000. Many residents donating their own PCs. Normal dial-up service is $5 a month, $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). Businesses can now get T1 wireless or SDSL for fee $125 monthly
Information on how to set up a similar enterprise can be found on the lariat site.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Don't worry about loosing your e-mail if you cancel your interlog account. I had an account there, and my dad's office did as well. I got pissed off with the service after they were bought out. So I cancelled my account. Nevertheless, I still have, just checked STILL!, shell access, PINE access, all that good stuff. Haven't been billed in about 2-3 years.
- Ando
My first ISP, io.org in Toronto, was the ultimate 'hacker' ISP. 20M of disk space, included shell account, good connectivity, etc. They did grow fairly well and had some problems with busy signals, but I stuck with them while a friend went to a "no busy signals" ISP that ended up sucking way bad.
io.org got taken over by some conglomerate and the service started sucking, so I went over to the OTHER big indie ISP, interlog.com.
Interlog rocked: 10M disk space, shell account, great news service, lot's of knowledgeable people on the phones, etc. The place was started by some 20 year old, and his big thing was having great service, so people flocked to his ISP.
They grew, got lots of happy customers, and eventually the founder got bought out by PSI net when they made him a substantial offer. This was at the same time PSI was buying out lots of other indie ISPs across Canada.
Suffice it to say, very quickly after PSI Net bought them out, services started to get cut, *very* quickly: shell went, then was given back, *very reluctantly*, after lots of complaints; disk space went down to 5M without much prior notice, and all tech support was relegated to friggin Ottawa!
I still have my minimal account at Interlog, becuase my email address there is known by all my friends dating back a good number of years. This spring I'm going to kill the account for good, and stick with DSL through Sympatico. They're pretty goddamn incompetant as well (see www.sympaticousers.org for some horror stories, esp with ADSL) but there's few options for where I live, and I'll be damned if I go to Roges@Home!!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I used to work for a small little ISP here in South Africa and we certainly provided excellent , personalized support on a daily basis with a good price. All our customers were very happy until our customer base got bought out by the local "Giant ISP"(M-Web)and all of a sudden the users started to complain to us about the bad service they're getting from the new owners. Well' it's a little more than 1 year doors and the big ISP lost most of the customers down the line .Our small ISP had to close its it bought from us. The worst part is that some of the customers blame us for selling them to the big ISP.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
we've used msall isp for years, but they are getting hard to find. when we first moved to georgia i had service with a small isp that got bought out by a company called g-net. they changed our user names, passwords, addresses, lost my wifes email account all together, lost my web page. their tech support was a bunch of kids reading from a script. it was a night mare.
Yes, you get getter service from a small local company in just about anything. But you as the consumer are to blame. You let yourself be sold by the big boys, hoping in the back of your mind that "this time it'll be different". Well, it ain't. The Mom and Pop ISPs were locked out of broadband by the big boys, and the attrition of customers to cable and DSL are a problem.
Their prices have not always been the lowest, but at this time they are competetive with the larger 2 other ISPs run by the phone company(Sympatico) and another Crown telecommunications corporation.
One other reason I have stuck with them, is out of respect, as they were the first ones to risk their money to provide internet access to people like me up in the sticks. The 2 larger ISPs only came in later.
So in this case I salute the mom & pop....at least until they can keep their rates competetive.
In otherwords, there are less small time ISPs, because someone of them have simply grown into the larger ones. I'm sure AOL at one time was only a local ISP with four or five techs to support it.
--------------------
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
It may seem trivial, but I've worked for "Mom & POP" ISPs for years, and here's what I've found.
Broadband kills alot of them. In areas where there is an outside, commercial company that offers some type of broadband service, there is little opportunity for the smaller companies to compete. In my town, for example, Time Warner has offered cable Net access for 3 years now. When that started, I noticed a rash of customers leaving for them. When I asked some of them (a few of whom had been good customers for years) why, it came down to speed every time. That didn't help the cause of the smaller ISPs, one of which I worked for.
A good number of them asked if it was possible to get cable access, with my company's service. But unfortunately, the cable network isn't open.
A year and a half ago, the ILEC (local phone company) started offering DSL service. It was bad, but we thought we had a chance to compete. They opened their DSL network, but at a very high cost. A dedicated Cisco 7206VXR and an ATM connection to the phone company was the entrance fee. Not exactly cheap, by any means, for a small ISP with only ~10,000 dialup customers, and a handful of frac T1 customers.
From our perspective, we didn't have much choice. It was either DSL or die (as a full-service ISP).
So after much deliberation, we decided to go ahead and set it up. My company could now offer DSL service to thier customers. Which we thought was great. The telco end of the DSL connection is regualted by the PSC, so we weren't worried about the ILEC undercutting price on that point.
However, after we started selling the service, and had a few hundred customers, the ILEC decided to play dirty. They dropped their prices on their Internet service to *half* of what ours (and the other "Partner" ISPs) was, but only for thier DSL customers. Because Net service isn't (and shouldn't be) regulated by the PSC, we had no recourse.
Of course, we kept some customers. The more technical ones who wanted multiple IPs, the ones who wanted to keep the same email address, the ones who had been with us, etc; they stayed.
Our service didn't really go anywhere. We signed up maybe 4 customers a week, but lost 2 or 3 of those due to local facilities issues.
The customer base kept shrinking, and employees kept leaving. I was one of them.
I now work for that ILEC, redesigning their DSL, dialup, and server network.
Somehow that is mildly satisfying.
AdamL.
The service is great, the support people know what the hell they're talking about, and I can talk to them any time, day or night, with a local phone call. All this for $6 a month.
In short, it's too good; it can't last much longer. Every month when I get my statement I expect to find out that they've been bought out.
...was a Mom 'n' Pop ISP in Memphis, called "Magibox". I had dropped out of philosophy grad school, and got a job there as Macintosh support and HTML jockey.
There were only four employees besides the owner and his wife. Three of us had advanced degrees in the humanities: me with a MA in philosophy, and two guys with MFAs in creative writing. We ran on a mix of Digital Unix and SCO. SCO was gradually replaced with FreeBSD. It gave me a chance to learn systems adminstration and Perl. (Many thanks to Ken McCleaft for the best advice I ever got: "learn vi".)
Eventually it was swallowed up by U.S. Internet, which prompted me to quit, as my position was going to change from technician to sales. I gave up some stock options that turned out to be utterly worthless. But my experience there got me a job as an entry level Unix sysadmin.
U.S. Internet was swallowed up by One Main, who was then swallowed up by Earthlink, who then merged with Mindspring.
Anyway, phone tech support sucked, but we had fun, and I learned a lot. The Mom 'n' Pop ISP was a great place to get started in a computer career, for those of us who studied Liberal Arts in college.
And for those of you wondering: yes, it really was just like "User Friendly". My funniest tech support moment was talking to this elderly woman, setting up Windows 95 dial-up networking. We got to the point in the wizard where you enter the phone number, and I tell her "Enter 555-7000". I hear from the other end "Beep beep beep boop boop boop boop", as she presses the keys on her touch tone phone. I had to put her on hold while I fell into a fit of laughter.
Thanks Louis, June, Ken, Mare, Craig, and Mike. And Neil who got me the job in the first place.
--
It isn't so surprising that smaller ISPs are getting scooped up by larger ones. It's a quick way to build a company. Especially if you're looking to go into a geographic area where you currently have no presence.
But in St. Louis, my company has had to scramble to cover our clients in the face of ISPs that just roll over and die without so much as a notice. This has happened at least four times in the past three months and each time the provider simply pulled up stakes, and turned off their service. And each time we get panicked calls from mutual clients that their Internet service is down. Then, of course, it's a mad dash to route them to a new ISP in a reasonable time.
And very often it isn't dial-up services that disappear. It seems that DSL oriented providers are biting it as well. Soon, there will probably be only three or four providers suitable for business Internet access in my area. The biggest? SouthWestern Bell.
the no
In the Boston area, we had three large Mom and Pop ISP's with shell access, etc: Shore.net, World.std.com and TIAC.
:-)
TIAC sucked. TIAC was also know as TYUK on the ne.internet.services newsgroup. Managed by a group of lamers -- including Tim Jackson who'd flame his customers on local newsgroups. Tech support was clueless and lousy. The only time it was usable was when Martin Hannigan was the sysadmin there. Thankfully PSInet bought them out.
Shore.net was great. They went out of their way to keep the customer happy. Just about every member of the staff had a clue. Also every year they hosted a clambake for their customers.
Now they are owned by Primus (Primus Sucks!) and only do vhost, colo, and dedicated box hosting. No dial-up.
The only real independent ISP left in town is The World @ Software, Tool, and Die. I personally have given up on dial-up, but if I had to go back, I'd use them. And, heh, they gave Kibo a job
We're still alive and kicking, although the outlook is entirely different than it was 18 months ago. At the time, we couldn't add modem pools fast enough (Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) wasn't very fast at accomodating us).
Suddenly, new dialup customers slowed dramatically and our investment in DSL turned out to be a wise one. I don't think any ISP will survive long without offering DSL. While DSL has it's own problems which every Verizon Sucks web site will tell you about, it should help keep us alive. Time Warner opening up their cable network to independent ISPs is also a good thing (but they're all talk at the moment).
We're not dead. We're far from it. It's sad to see the industry change so quickly so fast, but the bright side is that I have DSL now instead of a 56k. *shrug*
I am on a local ISP, and it's great. Years ago Hometown Computing was the first ISP to provide access here (in central Texas) on a local-call dialup, at a time when I was desperate to get any kind of internet access at all.
When I needed to scan images for my web site, I went down to the htcomp office and borrowed their scanner. The owner of the company was there, he sat down with me and showed me how to operate the software. Is that service, or what?
Well, I have my own scanner now.... Last week I got MMDS high-speed wireless service installed here. Once again, htcomp was the first to offer high-speed service in this area when nobody else (including Sprint) made the effort. MMDS is a new thing, and there were some glitches that had to be ironed out, but the staff worked hard on it and kept in touch with me until it was fixed.
I'm sure you can imagine my loyalty to this company. It really makes me wonder why big ISPs are taking over. If small companies can't make money selling dial-up access for $20 a month, they should charge $25 or $30. It would still be a bargain for the kind of reliable and responsive service that I've had from my ISP. (Heck, I pay more than that for satellite TV.)
Its been since 99 when I stoped using dial up and switched to cable, and ive quite frankly ignored all the other ISPs, ive been very happy with my local cable company's Road Runner service. However, when it came time for me to get a job out of highschool, I was hoping to get a part time for an ISP as a few of my friends did 2-3 years ago when they graduated. I was suprised that when I looked up the names of the ISPs I remembered off the top of my head - many no longer existed. 2-3 of the ones I remembered had since been merged and then bought out by earthlink I do beleive. I turned to the yellow pages to get many nerr neer neer sorry sounds. The few ISPs that were left, I was told either they were not hiring, or they can not hire because they are shutting down w/ in 90 days etc. I was very suprised, and then I realized most modemers I know are in the world of AOL or Southwestern Bell seems to be big around here too for dialup. Its sad. It seems the day of columbia internet (etc) are gone!
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Well, I have their service, anyway. LocalISP is exactly what they sound like, a local isp in New Jersey that until recently, offered dial up service. They have always had great customer support, to the point where sales and tech staff would recognize me by voice. Recently, thank god, they have started "reselling" DSL through Rhythms, which I'm not sure how that works, I'm sure I've got DSL through my nice, friendly, supportive local isp. It sounds like this is a good business model for broadband service companies, selling the bandwidth to local companies, who can then very effectiely be their front end for sales and support. If anyone else has heard any other company like this, let me know, I'm interested in seeing this work
Th
I think if you read your post once more, you will perhaps notice that the difference in size does matter. Working for a big company, employees rarely bothers with the company profile. In fact, you are often discouraged from communicating directly. More buraucracy tend to lead to communication problems and consumers feel they are talking to a corporation instead of people. Usually those people you are speaking- or corresponding to are different each time and have no real power to fix the problem.
Wether it's evil depends on your subjective opinion. For instance, many people rationalize what they do simply because they need money to buy a home, food, clothes, entertainment and so on. However, big companies doesn't need to rationalize, they solely exist to earn money on anything that can be screwed without a backlash.
This puts alot of responsibility to the leaders we put our faith in. (If you don't put faith in your superiors, why do you then follow them?) They, as everyone else, should have more arguments for doing what they do than solely to earn money. If they don't, it's your own fault for giving them your power.
In my book, having money as your God/highest objective is evil (or blindly stupid). However, that's just one definition of many. 'Evil' just one word of many.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
because I don't think any government will mind go and force every single small isp to install a carnivore box...
on the other hand, hoping in broadband access, everybody will be his own provider.
and that's sad..
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
But whats the advantage of having a shell account? I think I'm just looking at it from the perspective of; if you already run a *nix box, you've got a shell there. I can see someone wanting one if they run a Windows box, but whats the advantage of having a shell account?
Because you're not always *at* your Unix box. I can't count the number of times I've been at a friend's house, who only had a Windows PC, and needed to do a tracroute/nslookup/etc. (granted, Windows is a lot better about including these tools than they used to be, but I still prefer the full-blown Unix versions).
Because if you're troubleshooting, it can be invaluable having a machine that's part of another network. At my current job, there are very often questions along the lines of "Does such and such only work this way on our network, or does it do the same thing from the outside?" Similarly, the network at my job is firewalled pretty restrictively -- I can't even ping or traceroute outside machines from any of the systems outside the firewall. Similarly, if I decide I want to spend my lunch hour hanging out on IRC, I like being able to do so without using company cycles.
Because if you're also maintaining some sort of web/ftp space on the same account, it's *much* easier being able to manage files from a full-blown shell then by doing it all through an ftp client (renaming files, changing permissions, quick edits of text files, etc.)
Because I still prefer having a full-blown mail client like mutt or pine that I can use anywhere. Espescially since a lot of ISPs don't support IMAP, I've had to sometimes resort to things like telnetting into port 110 of a POP server and reading my new mail by hand (user username / pass password / list / retr 1 / quit).