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Mindspring Buys Netcom
Robotech_Master writes "There's an article on MSNBC about Mindspring's acquisition."
I find it interesting that Netcom will still hold on to some networks, and are basically only selling their customer base.
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It's not that unusual.. Didn't they buy PSI's
consumer business?
The beauty of this job is that this looks like ;)
_work_..
Besides, if you do it right, adminning systems is like being the maytag repairman.. They _need_ you in case TSHTF, but most of the time it doesn't..
My boss is the NT admin, and I don't envy him one top quark..
The last time I checked, "all circuts are busy" was a telco issue. Many ISP's "including the one I work for" have constant problems with the phone company not keeping up their end of the bargain. Companies don't continue to win awards like mindspring does if they are not doing something right. I wish my company did things half as well. You guys hiring?
+Sorry, seems they are more interested in getting
+bigger than better. Outside of Microsoft
+Mindspring is one of the best companies capable +of blowing smoke up their own ass.
Another halfwitted comment sent by someone who's
bashing their ISP when it's not even remotely
close to Mindspring's fault when you get an All
Circuts are Busy error. HELLO? ISP's do not
provide you with the service of telephoney
circuts, only the internet access after you
complete the call! A dial tone is not a service
they provide! Bitch at your telephone company if
they can't properly route your call or provide
enough TELEPHONE CIRCUTS to complete it!
THIS INCLUDES those people who like to bitch and
blame their ISP for lousy connections! You are
using telephone lines from your telephone company,
not your ISP! Blame your telephone company for
poor line conditions, noisy lines, lousy connects.
Big difference between high latency (not being
able to handle the volume with equipment) and bad
connections (noise, clicks, drops, etc...)
Mindspring is probably one of the few major
players out there who actually have their shit
together. They wouldn't have been able to stay
afloat and continue to make a profit if they
haven't... Mindspring also had the lowest
percentage of customer turnover in the country.
I live in Atlanta myself, so sir... If you're
having such a hard time connecting because the
telephone company can't route your call, why
don't you try calling BellSouth? Even changing
access numbers help, as it involves using a
different prefix and call route.
Mindspring may be big, but they're as good as
they've always been.
Big acquisition, yes, but Mindspring does this all the time. Check their press release archive. They even have a page for people interested in selling their dialup customers. It's become one of their specialties...
BTW, I'm a Mindspring customer, and their dialup service is the best I've used, even in spite of all these acquisitions. I know some people have problems all the time, but I don't... I've only had a few glitches in the couple years I've used Mindspring, and they've all been fixed almost immediately (except for the one time someone backhoe'd one of their fibre lines, which is hardly their fault...)
Yes. MindSpring's major source of customers is from the failings of other ISP's. While word of mouth and good press bring customers people are lazy. They dont jump ship unless they have to. With acquisions MindSpring has shown that you can earn a profit, please customers and grow quite rapidly. Sure its has not had its growing pains but no pain, no gain.
FYI: this is the LARGEST number of users acquired by MindSpring. In percentages PSI was "larger" since it was double the MindSpring customer base but this is HUGE, making their customer base somewhere over a million according to reports. Who is next? Earthlink? AT&T? Bellsouth?
While something like Spaminator can help weed
out spam to your customers *after* their spam
already hits your mail machines, contacting the
ISPs from where these spams originate and getting
their accounts shut down might be another avenue
for your abuse department to pursue, if they don't do so already. Yes, it is easy for abusers to create new accounts elsewhere, but you make spamming less easy for them to do. An abuse team working with a legal department may even make it possible for you to pursue this legally.
In my opinion, filtering spam out is only half of the work that needs to be done... if you don't do
something about the spam hitting your servers in
the first place, no matter how robust they may be, the mail volume may eventually reach some sort of critical melting point. Just my humble opinion.
This is day one. I have worked for Netcom
nearly five years. Mindspring's whole attitude
about the customers, the business, and the employees I can already tell is WAAAAAAY better
than Netcom or ICG would EVER be. This is a great day for netcom customers and employees.
I was a Netcom customer for three years who finally got sick of their crap and cancelled two months ago. Ever since Netcom got on the merger craze, their service has been nothing but crap. First they raised their rates to $22/month. Then a few months later, they "lost" a payment I sent in and then put my account on hold. I called their customer service and got a message that all of their people were busy, and then it disconnected me. It took a week to get my account reactivated. If that wasn't enough, they did the same thing again the very next month! Then they mailed me a letter infoming me that they were changing their billing center and they had a new address to send all payments to. Sure would have been nice if they had told me that 2 months ago! I had had it with them, so I cancelled Netscum and am now paying less money for better service from another ISP (Infonex). Screw Netcom. Netcom=expensive, crappy service.
We have netcom service for one division of our business and uunet for another in the same building, 2 separate T1's. The netcom one has had so many problems and their support is so bad, i have grown to loathe the entire company. Never have i dealt with support that is so difficult to get a hold of, so surly, so uncoordinated, and so mind-numbingly out to screw over the customer. Makes MS and Lotus cc:Mail seem quick, cheerful and helpful by comparison. We just signed a contract to dump Netcom.
I had one problem on the uunet, turned out to be not their problem, but they tracked it down quickly and followed up. Could be a quirk, only had to call them once.
I'm a Netcom web hosting customer who chose Netcom's web hosting service at least in part because they use Linux/Apache on their servers and don't charge extra for full CGI access.
I hope Mindspring doesn't intend to change that....
Ahh... so Mindspring has those issues to deal with as well.
Netcom's Atlanta 56k access number gives all circuits busy quite a bit of the time as well. Lately, it's been more busy signals, maybe BellSouth is starting to get its act together. But it took four months!!!!
Since BellSouth provides Internet service and has caused such a big problem with Netcom and Mindspring, maybe the Federal Trade Commission needs to investigate anticompetitive practicies on BellSouth's part.
Because of my (highly negative) experiences with USWest, BellSouth at least used to have a good bit of respect from me for good quality service. Oh, well....
Already been done. He bounced a few times
and that was it.
Is that your opinion, or is it substantiated by fact? I'm a member of Netcom's Web Hosting Engineering staff, and Linux has been plenty stable for us. Customers seem to be happy with the service as well.
Seconding that motion, we at Netcom met Mindspring's COO yesterday and i can see a very positive shift about to occur.
When I worked for Netcom, I said to an employee who was there for a long time and well-known among Netcom's customer base that Mindspring is a good ISP. He agreed.
I think the main reason why Netcom had the problems with the abuse department it has had is because of the clulessness management had w.r.t. abuse problems. Too many PHBs who had no clue what the internet was about. It took the RBL to get those idiots to listen.
Mindspring being in charge should change all this.
- Script Bunny
Todd is an active member of the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, and also the maintainer of the Gnome FAQ. He is a very big linux supporter. The fact that he is honest about DU's superiority over linux for webhosting only increases the enormous amount of respect I have for him already. I've heard that you can get at least 1000 unique hosts on one 400 mhz dec alpha. Given that rack space is very expensive, that's pretty damn cool. Also, you don't go to rootshell.com and find very many interesting thing that relate to digital unix. Now linux on the other hand...........
Thanks - that answers my question. No disrespect intended.
Netcom's been sighted for using an abuse "pui" bot that "tries" to understand headers, and fails miserablly to detect faked headers. Let's hope Mindspring can gather a white hat with their abuse department.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Do it, it's worth at least releasing it to the public. Announce it to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Yes, but we all work for MindSpring!
Scott, I know for a fact that you do have work
to do. Don't make me come down there.
Plus, it's bad form to brag.
More MindSpringer's than me read /.? wow. :) I thought I was the only one. I'm certainly the only one on my team that's heard of them. Maybe we need to talk. ;)
@}--`--
Two words for ya son : Telco Issues
MindSpring (and most ISP's) have had major issues with the Baby Bells (BellSouth, Bell Atlantic, PacBell, etc), ESPECIALLY the ones that also provice internet access (i.e. BellSouth.Net)
Operator messages and fast busy signals are Telephone Company problems, not ISP issues. Bitch at the phone company.
And as for UDP packets, you're just having bad luck. I can play StarCraft on battle.net with the best of them, with no packet loss whatsoever.
:)
@}--`--
We're working on it. Our Spaminator (tm) gets most of the spam that hits our servers, and we're adding more and more spammers to it every day.
It's not perfect, but it's better than NetCom's.
@}--`--
Like the customizable Spaminator that lets people filter out spam email that get through the defaults? :)
@}--`--
Sorry, seems they are more interested in getting bigger than better. Outside of Microsoft Mindspring is one of the best companies capable of blowing smoke up their own ass.
Its a constant in Atlanta... getting "circuts are busy" or failed connects. That and their use of buggy 3COM Total Control racks that drop UDP packets so consistently that at prime time its quite possible to see 100% packet loss.
Too bad, they were a good company once, now they are just a big one.
..
. * Did aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
I love working for this company.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
One thing we did recently at MindSpring was give our customers using the unlimited plan 5 megs of webspace ( there used to be none with this plan ) without raising the price of the plan. We also doubled the commercial webhosting space without increasing the price of that plan. We work hard to improve our product offering as we get better deals on things and improve the way we do things.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
i'm at school... man do i like 1st period :o)
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
Todd,
If you're going to beat sevn, may I watch?
Since when has all circuts are busy messages been a problem of an ISP? That is the telephone companies lines not having the capacity to handle the phone call volume being transfered over them.
Might want to mention that the call centers are in Atlanta, GA... Harrisburg, PA.... and Phoenix, AZ.