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Smaller ISPs Have Happier Customers, UK Based Study Says (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson, writing for BetaNews: If you have eschewed the big names and opted for a smaller ISP, you probably have a happier broadband experience. These are the findings of a report which says the big four ISPs in the UK -- BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk -- are rated lower than their smaller rivals. In fact, the highest rated provider, SSE, has only been in the broadband game since 2014, with Yorkshire-based Plusnet coming in second place, says Cable.co.uk. Of the big names, TalkTalk provides broadband to 13 percent of UK internet users, yet it scored just 6.66 out of 10 and placed in ninth position. The four biggest companies accounts for 87 percent of the market, but the best performer -- Sky -- only managed to hit fifth place.
Ice cream more popular than brussels sprouts.
Dominant players in the market tend to recognize ability to rest on their laurels, while smaller players tend to be more aggressively trying to win business. If they fail to do that, they'd go out of business.
Basically a company with prospects for growth will, on average, do better by their customers than a company without any prospect to grow.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Smaller businesses usually don't have shareholders and recognize the importance of customer loyalty. Larger businesses tend to be more concerned with extracting as much money from people as possible while cutting corners. It's fine to want to make a profit, provided you're not cutting corners and cheating your customers. Unfortunately, telecommunications has become just as Jewish as many other industries in this regard.
Small ISP's usually employ local people, you can walk in to discuss/pay/whatever at n office. Where if you go with a large ISP you're likely to get an India call center, poor service, and frequently sketchy internet plans that change without notice or come with a contract. Also, the small ISP's generally offer unlimited(here in Canada anyway).
Yup. I love it when I have a problem with my tiny ISP; when I call them, it's the NOC that answers, and not a script monkey with a cute accent.
I'm with Zen Internet. They're cheap, they give me a static IP address, they don't mind me running a Linux server off my connection and....lord be praised....when you call technical support you immediately get to speak to an honest-to-goodness engineer. AN ACTUAL ENGINEER. Somebody who knows the difference between a web address and an IP address and doesn't ask you to turn off your firewall as part of their checklist/script. They don't supply a router when you sign up, but they seem to know the admin screens of lots of different makes and basically talked me through configuring mine over the phone. I was a Sky customer for a week once when my previous small ISP got bought out by them. Never again.
That's simply because they haven't tried a Single-Payer Provider — that's where the ultimate happiness resides.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Back in college I worked tech support at the local small town ISP (San Marcos Internet, in San Marcos, TX, if anybody is wondering). It was about as two-bit of an operation as it could be. Although their transfer speeds couldn't come close to what the bigger players in town offered (TWC, Grande Communications), people absolutely LOVED us for the simple reason that we actually cared about our customers, which they found absolutely refreshing compared to the treatment they'd get from the bigger guys. We'd do things like have people bring their computers in so that we could fix all the fucked up things wrong with them (remove viruses, spyware, etc). Eventually they got scooped up by one of the bigger guys (Grande), which really pissed a lot of folks off.
http://xkcd.com/806/
And my ISP proudly is as of October 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews_%26_Arnold
then bring it. Right now. As long as you don't let your local right wing party under fund it then it'll be fantastic. The here in Arizona we passed a law mandating service levels at our DMV and made sure the funding was enough and it's pretty fantastic. Short waits, knowledgeable staff. Now, you do have to watch out for folks with that "Starve the Beast" mentality who'll slash funding and then say "See, Gov't can't do anything right!". But if you do that you'll be fine.
Put another way, I've yet to meet a Canadian or Brit who makes under $300k/yr and would trade their Health care system for mine.
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is that they're too small to realize the cost savings from screwing their customers over in little ways. A 10 minute wait isn't worth it for them. Ditto Saving $100 bucks on some switches by buying the cheap stuff. Those little costs savings are huge for a mega corp. Your lousy customer service is some mid grade VP's summer home.
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My smaller ISP (Zen Internet, zen.co.uk) certainly provide good service.
When you can create a trouble ticket with your ISP advising them that they have a likely link problem causing packet loss and resulting traffic congestion in their peering with another ISP, including route traces from several directions, and they respond within 2 hours thanking you for the report and having fixed the problem - then you know they're the ones to be with.
They're also more than averagely resistant to media industry intimidation pass-through (they demand a court order, instead of just giving up info at a whim) and government surveillance (they don't sign up to "voluntary" Government initiatives for more inept censorship).
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Plusnet is owned by BT - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plusnet .
SSE a billion dollar utility company. Plus.net one of the largest isps in the uk and now owned by BT (I'm with them, its a nightmare to get anything fixed).
Now it might make sense that if the subject is plural (hence, usually ends with an 's') the verb should too. It might make sense if you are normally speaking the jolly old Pundujabit, old chap.
But it's doesn't work like that.
At the bottom of the
In the US, you can find a small ISP servicing your address at http://isp.ninja/
Yeah, those nasty right wing AmeriKKKan$ underfunding Britain's biggest ISP?..
With sufficient funding, government can make anything "fantastic". The point is, competing private companies inevitably offer even better service for the same money.
Maybe, you are hanging out with a healthier crowd. Canadians certainly do cross the Southern border for healthcare.
And while you complain about sabotage of government-provided services, American healthcare system is an example of government's sabotage of private industry. What, for example, is the reason, I can not purchase a health-insurance policy from a different state? Capitalism works, when there is competition — after eliminating/reducing it to the point of mono- or duopolies in each state, the Illiberal Statists will claim: "market failure"! And transform American health-care into a bigger and uglier version of the VA hospital system.
Maybe, you are a Socialist, who'd like the government to be in charge of everything. But if you aren't, then I'm at a loss as to why you'd want them to take over the Internet-service provision and health-care, but not, for example, food-distribution or automobile-production.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ironically, that is more the US system than the UK system. Sure, one player owns all the copper, but the government sets the rate at which that copper is sold. So the actual infrastructure is a single entity akin to a public utility but the service level is an open market. This is how small ISP's can compete against megacorps like Virgin or BT, they cant be locked out of the infrastructure. It also has the knock on effect of keeping the big boys honest. Unlike the US where telco's are given local monopolies and people are told to go fuck themselves if they dont like AT&T's shitty service.
Dunno about you, but I like my 100mbit fibre with unlimited downloads at just 32 GBP a month. If that is the cost of socialism, bring it on Comrade.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
That article is complete bollocks in the way you're using it. Canadians are crossing the border for elective surgery that isn't covered by their universal health care... meaning people getting nose and boob jobs. Its the same as saying that Australians are fleeing to Thailand for medical care when in reality they're only going there to get their tits done at half the cost... Or Americans fleeing to the Philippines for dental care... Which is 100% true although out of context. A lot of Americans get non-emergency dental work done in the Phils.
You haven't found a critical flaw in the Canadian system, you found an article about medical tourism.
Meanwhile, unlike the Canadians, there are people in the US going without emergency care because your health care system is profit oriented, not service oriented.
And while you complain about sabotage of government-provided services, American healthcare system is an example of government's sabotage of private industry.
Now you're completely off your tree.
The private health care industry is a complete failure and the government is sabotaging itself by opposing measures to fix it (namely the Republicans trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act).
I live in the UK, I pay into National Insurance which covers all forms of social security. My yearly National Insurance payments cost less than health insurance for a single American. National Insurance does not just cover the NHS (health care) but also pensions, benefits and care for the sick... And it costs less than what you pay for medical insurance. Why... because the NHS is service oriented and does not need to make ever increasing profits. A UK doctor will not send you for unnecessary tests to bump up the profit margin, they wont prescribe unnecessary medicines to get a kick back from the pharmaceutical company. A UK doctors only concern is getting you back to health, if this means bed rest or a change in lifestyle, then that is what they'll prescribe.
Hell, your own article points out that the UK is the best nation on earth for health care. As for calling people names, it demonstrates two things. 1) you know your point is wrong and 2) have no idea what those words actually mean (this is evident because you use them out of context). It only makes you sound desperate and afraid.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
They have been great.
You can find support on IRC at 23:00 most of the time.
The barrier to entry for the resources to monitor customer usage to basically working for free for the media cartels, the period of data retention, and other legal requirements are a big barrier of costs of entry on the business that familiar ISPes can no longer afford.
The advantage of big companies is that they gain economies of scale. But customer service doesn't scale very well. Every time customer service becomes a focus, the accounting department shuts down the budget. Call center personnel are low paid and poorly trained because their managers are low paid and poorly trained, having come up through the ranks of the underfunded call centers. This happens across the board. The engineers know that they could improve reliability (and customer satisfaction) by upgrading old equipment. But the accounting department/shareholders won't risk the dividend by releasing a lot of capital if the payback isn't within an arbitrary time period. So population dense areas get constant upgrades (because managers can easily justify the upgrade), while areas with longer payback get put on the back burner -or worse, the old stuff from the upgraded area gets shipped off to the more expensive operating areas.
Of course this all limits innovation in an industry. It only really works when there isn't sufficient competition, through controlling access to capital and/or regulation. By precisely controlling the upgrade cycle and product offers, you can define what constitutes customer service. It worked great for the old Ma Bell AT&T, and today it seems to work well for the cellular industry. The cable ISPs are slow to learn, but getting there. When the cable companies manage to rein in the marketing department we'll see customer service improve.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
An interesting contrast you are trying to make. So, being service-, rather than profit-oriented is the key? Does that mean, non-profits are always better — should restaurants and health-clubs become non-profit too, even if that means nationalizing them?
If not, why? What's so uniquely special about the service of health-care, that it — and it alone — is better run by the government?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
really?
you haven't figured this part out yet?
You're trying to applies restaurant economics to healthcare and that simply doesn't work.
the two are not comparable.
When you go to a restaurant, if they screw up your order you'll probably still live.
When you go to a restaurant, and they recommend the fish it's not because the alternative is death.
In healthcare peoples lives are on the line.
And if they present you a choice between 200k$ surgery or certain death, it doesn't matter what your financial situation is, you're going to choose the surgery. And there is very little shopping around to be done especially because when it comes to life saving medicine or surgery time is a factor.
This does NOT happen, nor should it be expected to :
"You've got days to live unless we act now."
"That's ok, ill shop around first."
JFC you act like this is a new concept to you, which only helps further reinforce how idiotic and ill-informed you are.
there are areas where profit motive is a detriment, where it actively impedes other more important motives such Quality.
Health care is one. Aircraft maintenance (both civil and military, and ive worked both) is another.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Reality calling:
http://theincidentaleconomist....
-rich people have always ignored borders
-they're not talking about life threatening medicine, but elective medicine. non-lifethreatening.
know how you reduce wait times?
by spending more money.
its the old engineer axiom:
fast, cheap, or effective. pick two.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
also many of the people who sought care outside Canada did so because they were -already- outside the country.
the number that -left- the country to seek care is still vanishingly small, and predominantly rich.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That may be a reason to regulate doctors stricter. But it is not a reason to nationalize them...
Of course, there is plenty of "shopping around" — or, rather, there can be. People even travel abroad for such procedures — they aren't all about "boob jobs" as someone claimed. Some times time is, indeed, of essence, but that's far from the norm. Except in an aftermath of an accident, it is, thankfully, very rare, that a person discovers, he must undergo a surgery within hours. Usually, surgeries and other procedures are scheduled in advance — indeed, long waits for such procedures is the number one complaint of Canadians. Having already paid for them with their taxes, they have little choice but to wait, but, if they were allowed to choose, some would've chosen different.
And that, really, is the bottom line — you can not (or rather, should not be allowed to) compel me into joining whatever health-care scheme you wish. No way, no how. It is my life, my body, and my money.
Really? Why, then, is my healthcare so much better here, than it was in the worker's paradise called USSR?
So, your argument is, any service, where bad quality may result in the consumer's death, should be nationalized?
Is government really a better guardian of quality of service provided by its monopoly, than competition among service-providers would be?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.