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Earthlink and Mindspring Merge
bee writes "Yet another ISP merger-- Earthlink and Mindspring this time. The new company will keep the Earthlink name, and will apparently be the 2nd largest ISP in the country. Yahoo has the story here." Together, they'll have over 3 million members. Not exactly AOL, but enough to have some serious clout in the ISP business.
(Disclaimer- I no longer work at MindSpring)
It took me a while to figure out what was going on with the merger- I hadn't seen a real merger before. Most other 'mergers' are one company buying out another one. This is the real thing- they're forming a new company and then merging both of the existing ones into it.
From MindSpring's press release, it looks like things go like this: MindSpring changes it's name, gets bigger, and gains an officer.
As one of the first MindSpring employees, it's sad to see the name change. Especially since MindSpring's name stands for quality as one of the best ISPs in the country, and EarthLink's name stands for spam and Scientologists. But the merger is good news all around- the new EarthLink will be big enough to take on almost any challenge that comes along. Users don't have to worry about someone like AT&T or another Big Ugly Company buying them out.
It doesn't look like there will be that many changes apart from the name change- Charles and Mike will be in charge of the new company, one of ELNK's officers will stay on as an officer, and Sky Dayton will step down from management and have a seat on the board. The company's headquarters will be at MindSpring's offices in Atlanta.
As for the comments about MindSpring and how their aquisitions have gone (especially Netcom), Netcom hasn't gone very well, but that's not really MindSpring's fault. Netcom's systems were pretty screwed up, and MindSpring has had their hands full trying to quickly bring Netcom subscribers off of what could be thought of as a sinking ship.
Some things weren't communicated very well, but that was only because of the urgent need to get people off of the equipment at Netcom.
I worked at MindSpring for almost four years, and I can say that I've never worked with a more talented group of people. The people they've got in their Engineering department are amazing. Their upper management (McQuary) is excellent. No matter what mistakes they've made, they're a company that's going places, whether they're called MindSpring or Earthlink.
Robbie
-- Comtrends!
It's to prevent spam. Ah, that wonderful catch-22. You can complain about spam but the only way to *deal* with it is to prevent everyone from running their own smtp server.
And now, even if the ISP doesn't block the smtp port, it really doesn't matter because large e-mail services, bigfoot.com, juno.com, and others are using MAPS the Mail Abuse Prevention System. So mail is blocked from dynamic IP's anyways :-(
Freedom with spam, or no spam with no freedom? I think I'll take the spam.
They still advertise "unrestricted" net access but that's pretty damn restrictive if you ask me.I think "unrestricted" refers to web filters and newsgroups. Not ports.
-Brent -Brent--
Oh, you can't tell me they passed up the opportunity to rename it Mindlink. Earthspring however, would have made them sound all wet.
Move along nothing to see here, just another Mindlinker.
Rip
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
I've been wondering about bringing this up on Slashdot, but I suppose this is an appropriate time.
First a little background. My significant other is an upper level tech support representative at Earthlink's main site in Pasadena. I apologize for posting anonymously but I want to prevent reprisals. If anyone would like to contact me privately
The way Earthlink's dial-up service works is this. They have their own POPs (Points of Presence) which are relatively inexpensive to run. They also lease POPs from three major providers, UUNet, PSInet, and Level 3. In level of quality and cost it goes roughly like UUNet, PSINet, Earthlink, Level 3. The cost of time on a UUNet POP is quite expensive, to the point that any user that uses UUNet for an average amount of time per month generates expenses in excess of the monthly user subscriber fee.
Earthlink has tried several methods to reduce use of UUNet POPs. Tier 1 tech support agents are told to never give out UUNet numbers. Earthlink employees are not allowed to use UUNet POPs for personal use. However, there are many users for whom UUNet is the only available number, and many more for whom it is the only reliable number.
After some management shakeups in tech support, a "Tier 3" team has been created, with some of the better techs at Earthlink, who were promised higher pay (which they got). What they did not know was that they would be forced to call up customers who use UUNet POPs and lie to them, tell them that they are logged in twice (which violates the usage agreement) and that their account will be cancelled. They cannot tell them the truth, that they are using expensive POPs, in fact users are not supposed to know that Earthlink leases POPs at all. This activity may or may not be illegal, and if investigated probably only middle management or worse, tech support agents, would take the fall. I feel that it is at the very least unethical and should be known.
What protections are available to whistle blowers in cases such as this? Does anyone know if this kind of activity is widespread in ISPs?