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PC World's ISP Service Rankings, as of June 2005
Ant writes "Broadband Reports reports a PC World article on the best and worst Internet Service Providers (ISPs). More than 6,000 PC World readers rated major providers for its speed, technical support, and more. The article also reveals which broadband and dial-up services make the grade and which fall flat."
Last time I called my ISP for tech support, they left me on the line with some automated POS for 20 minutes. Then, after I followed all of its crap instructions, it made me wait for 20 more minutes while it was "waiting for my modem to respond." If the modem would connect to their network, do you think I would have been calling them?! As far as I am concerned, most everywhere with a "Tech support" department fails.
Scott Swezey
Only the biggest, corporate ISP's are considered. Where are the independent national ISP's that frequently outrank the big ones in other surveys, such as bway.net and Speakeasy?
I doubt it's as much a matter of a "Massive Shareholder" as the fact that it's just not worth it to support Linux for many consumer-level ISPs. Carve out the number of home Linux machines from the total market. From that, carve out the number of Linux users who AREN'T advanced enough to resolve their own issues. The handful of people you'd have left hardly justifies setting up a support infrastructure for Linux.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
It's unfortunate to see that Speakeasy, an ISP known for its flexible usage policies, is not specifically represented in that review. From the TOS: "Speakeasy believes in the right of the individual to publish information they feel is important to the world via the Internet." This includes allowing servers and sharing connections, as long one's activities don't disrupt others' use. As a DSL customer that is outside SE's range, I am curious how SE compares to the more restrictive services of the companies represented in the review.
Disclaimer: I'm a network engineer for one of the major cable companies.
I think these types of surveys are really misleading, because the major players are all HUGE companies that typically have completely different management in each area. The major part of the problem is how these companies were formed, by buying out existing companies. Obviously someone needs to still run the business for that area so most/all the employees come with the purchase. What you end up with is a division that doesn't always fit in with the rest of the company and continue to run things the old way. Even if their performance is better than the rest of the purchasing company on average standardization is necessary to ensure quality.
Along these same lines I work in a division that is typically 1st or 2nd in the entire company on many measurements. Our customer satisfaction measurements are very high. But I could point to areas in the company that typically very low in general. The opinion of the company by the customer is drastically different in those areas.
So I guess what I'm getting at is take these results with a grain of salt. I work very very hard to make sure that every customer is taken care of and just because someone in Kentucky had a bad experience doesn't mean someone in Florida won't have a terrific one with the same company.
For those in Switzerland, Cybernet is a really good ISP.
They've upgraded my connection twice, for free, from 512/128 to 768/128 to 1.5/256. They offered static IPs years ago, when it was almost impossible to get them from other Swiss ISPs. Their tech support is intelligent, helpful, and nice; a live person answers the phone right away. They don't appear to try to pull any of the silly things some American ISPs frequently do, like kicking off heavy users, or disallowing servers.
I use them for home, and I'd use them at my office if I could get anything other than IDSL from them at my location (I have an office in a huge old industrial complex where only Verizon and ISPs with facilities in the building can offer DSL). I've sent several of my friends and customers to Speakeasy with high confidence, and though I also wish they'd charge a little less, it's nice to have a DSL ISP that's still in business. That's pretty rare.
(I should know, before Speakeasy I was a Flashcom customer and then a DirecTV DSL user)
I did have a lot of trouble with them in early 2003, when I first signed up after DirecTV DSL chomped. The first time was really Verizon's fault - they screwed up the line release. The second time, though, was in May '93 when Speakeasy started switching users away from Covad's backbone - I was down for nearly two weeks and nearly walked away then.
To their credit, service since then has been utterly impeccable. The longest unscheduled outage I've had has been about 5-10 minutes or so, and never during the day. Speeds to most locations is very good as well. The important thing to me at this point is that Speakeasy tries to take care of customers properly, and even if they goof once in a while the fact that they make an effort is way better than most of the giants will do.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I still maintain that having a dynamic IP and port filters is like having a phone which can't receive most incoming calls and whose number changes every day. It's next to useless. Sure, people can leave messages for you elsewhere (via your ISP's email), but if you want to have your own answering machine (maybe your ISP blocks large attached files), you can't. Perhaps you don't need all of your ISP's services (webspace that doesn't have PHP, unreliable e-mail, whatever) and just want a network connection so you can manage your communication as you see fit---what good is a major broadband ISP then?
The server-client infrastructure relies on some VERY powerful servers that can handle tons of connections. If there are six billion humans online sometime down the road, they aren't all going to be able to be on AIM at the same time. Duh. The ARPANET was more of a redundant network with a handful of nodes (which were all servers with local access) on equal footing. We moved away from that. Now, we're moving into an age of P2P communications. ISPs need to realize that although a lot of people surf the web, the Internet is more than just a giant TV. It's not just about centralized content.
I'm on Speakeasy. It may be a bit more costly, but, if I add up the cost of cheap broadband and PHP webhosting with tons of disk space, I'm saving buttloads of money. Hell, they even give me whatever reverse-DNS entry I want for my IP address for free.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
And everything to do with marketing. Anyone who's seen earthlink's recent commercials know they're promoting the wazoo out of spam blocking. How do you know how good spam blocking is? I'd assume everyone gets some. Why not sign up for a bunch of junkmail lists with each ISP and see which one clobbers the most?
This survey means very little to me other than if I was in marketing for one of these groups. Then I'd care.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.