[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

[John L. Bass]

	> Very few ISPs maintain their own ports any longer.  As I understand it,
	> FRII was to have had the same granularity as before, but ICG didn't come
	> through.

	But in that case, I would expect FRII to deal with it... either by going to
	another provider, or forcing ICG to do what they promised to do (by
	contact, if necessary).

	But, as I've intimated before, I get the feeling their dialup customers
	are a distant fifth to their commercial, co-lo, hosting, and DSL customers.

	Dialup just isn't lucrative enough (for them to care) anymore... which I
	understand, but then they should get out of the business... not blame
	problems on ICG because they went with a 2nd-rate provider to save some
	money.

That's the tough one ... in the last 20 years effective ISP service prices in the
market have continually gone down while staffing, equipment, and circuit costs continue
to climb faster than inflation. Being charged by the minute/hr for connect time
replaced with largely unlimited service, free web site hosting, multiple pop email
accounts, extensive tech support for non-service related issues (IE help with Windoze
problems, applications software, and driver/hardware support for a wide range of
access devices the ISP didn't even sell). And expectations of even more ... like your
local phone line problems for a line that FRII didn't even provision for you and
you pay Quest directly for. To debug your problem would require a line tech onsite at
your location or at the switch/pair-gain system and a $70K testset and spectrum
analyzer.

The reason that most small ISP's got out of the business was because the cost of
maintaining support staff and the current protocol modem pool race was rapidly
exceeding dwindling revenue per customer while minumium offered service levels by
larger competitors drove the stake thru their hearts by becomeing "less competitive"
for the dollar.

Most people stick by local providers like FRII, simply to avoid AOL, Quest, AT&T
and large corporate america ... and frequently accept a little less in services
for supporting the local little guys. Not all customers are willing to make this
service quality tradeoff - and shop strictly by the dollar.

John