[aclug-L] Re: General Help Request: Trace Route?

["Ryan Hunt" <ryan@xxxxxxxx>]

-SNIP-
> Needless to say we were a very unhappy SWBIS customer.  SWBTelephone is
> much better at what they do but SWBIS just isn't.
>
> Chris
-SNIP-

I dunno about that ;)
My DSL lines are newedge, which are leased from SWBTelephone.. I remember 1
particular point last summer where I was without internet for 10+ days
because SWBT had a hell of a time figuring out that the box out back needed
the exact same part replaced that it needed the 2x my dsl went down in the
past.. my ISP wasent to blame, authough it wasent until like day 8 that they
really hunched down and started threatening SWBT, it was because there staff
is poorly trained in these new data services.. Out of the 20 different people
sent out to my house it wasent until the SAME GUY who not only installed my
dsl but fixed it in the past came out and saw the obvious problem..

As far as local DSL goes, if you buy your DSL from a local provider with
there own internet infrastructure (hint,hint hubris.net among others) you
will still have to deal with SWBT for any issues with your lines, however
all of the local ISP's I've worked for have been good about not over-selling
there service capabilities.. Not to mention you often get much better and
faster support from local ISP's when compared to national or semi-national ISP's

Another issue end users don't take into consideration is that sometimes
down-time cant be helped, sometimes it can... Some providers are lazy and
have bare minimum procedures for problem solving and some times the down time
is unnessicary and unacceptable.. Other times it can be the exact opposite, I
remember doing support last summer when Texas got flooded, our first hop on
to the internet happened to be 6ft under water and we were down for almost 4
days... For reasons beyond my understanding the backbone provider couldent
reroute us through another city so we were SOL until they sand bagged the
facility, pumped out the water and restored power and replaced equipment..
Most users were sympathetic but there was still allot of irate people who
cant understand that some times down time cant be prevented until after it
happens.. When we came back up we made the backbone provider route our
redundant lines through different cities..

I bet that if half of the world was in ruins from some catastrophic
event that users in unaffected parts will still bitch about access problems :P

-R



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