|
|
When your ISP "goes bad": unpleasant alternativesNov 23 '00 Write an essay on this topic.Divorcing your ISP can be an emotional, heart wrenching experience. It can also cripple your ability to communicate via e-mail. A first clue that this relationship is in trouble might include weird administrative policies. In our case we had established the account six or seven years ago. The plan we have allows six hundred hours per month of connection time. We pay an extra three dollars a month for a second e-mail address. I belatedly discovered a sixty-to-seventy dollar a month surcharge for April, May and June. The explanation was that my wife’s access was being billed at a dollar an hour of connect time. According to the provider she was an “e-mail only customer” and we had been “getting a good deal” for the earlier six years. I questioned their logic: Does a second e-mail address constitute a second account? After hurting a few people’s feelings, the surcharge was adjusted. My wife and daughter now have to log in on the second account to receive/send mail. Now they must log-off and return as me for routine surfing. Performance on any ISP has good months and bad months. The unwritten credo of every ISP is to “Never admit that you have a problem (until after it’s fixed)”. Over the years friendly folks at the help desk have tried to attack the “busy”, “slow” and other problems. During this period, I’ve come to know several voices. No matter what the problem is: Person A will ask me to change the registry. Person B will suggest I must plug/unplug every connection. Person C will have me reload software. Person D will blame ATT for T1/3 problems. Person E will suggest the problem is with my Telco connection. Person F will have me change every parameter imaginable in Windows and my browser. Person G will explain that it’s a hardware problem (mine). A more balanced approach might be nice. In recent months this ISP has been unusable. Connect time of over one minute (before “dropping”) is rare. Speed based on the random number generated by the browser is often in the low twenties (56K modem). Speed computed at the computingcentral.com site is generally too slow to measure. At the same time the free ISP’s are performing acceptably. I dropped an ISP years ago. Paid them ten dollars a month, for about two years to allow my .forward file to transfer e-mail to my current account. My situation is now a bit different. All of my correspondence, business cards etc. use my “real” domain e-mail. This is forwarded to whomever I please. Problem solved. Get a new ISP and change the forwarding on all e-mail accounts. What about the people who get your (my) e-mail address from prior correspondence? They’ll continue to use the old one. How about the many sites that you are registered with that use an e-mail as your account name? Trouble. Solutions: 1. Drop the horrid ISP to the least costly service ($9.95) and use them as e-mail only until your “legacy” sender’s records can be updated. 2. Pay three dollars a month to a friend who still uses the crummy service for an additional e-mail in your name. .forward that account. 3. Start a new service of your own. Keep your account. Charge all of that ISP’s unhappy clients five dollars a month and add their addresses to your account. Forward them to the appropriate new account. Probably more headaches than profit. 4. Get a few hundred, million from the venture capital community and start an “intercept” service. This might be analogous to the message you get from mother bell when you dial a disconnected number. As none of these solutions are terribly viable, I’ll probably maintain dual service for a few months. After that I’ll lose some mail and hope that it wasn’t important. I’ll further be exploring alternative methods of somehow “ghosting” from or Telneting to the “real” domain. Sooner or later the future ISP will “go bad” and we start the process again. If you have a better solution please “Yell”.  |
| Write the first comment on this review! |
|
Ads by Google
|
