The Extinction Of The Mom & Pop ISP Service? 265
RFL asks: "SFGate (site of the San Francisco
Chronicle) has this feature article describing the unexpected deaths of local Internet Service Providers after they are taken over by large telecommunication companies, leaving the customers totally forgotten. Only after giving it a moment of thought did I realize that a lot of those small ISP's, the ones with those cool cool domain names, were in fact gone. These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC. So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations?" As it is with most companies that get swallowed up by larger entities, the increase in customer base usually means a decrease in customer support and personal-touch that made earlier ISPs so successful. Is there still room for the small-time ISP in today's market or has dial-up Internet become solely the realm of big-time providers?
Verio Borging (Score:1)
They were planning the regional infrastructure to support their ISDN/Frame/T1 clients, and decided that a T3 (with NO redundancy) was sufficient to service all of them. After my non-techie boyfriend took exception to this in an engineering meeting, they finally consented to put in a T1 as backup in case the T3 fell over.
Well, no surprise, the T3 eventually fell over. Unfortunately for them, the T1 wasn't in place yet, and they had most of their larger clients off the air for 48 hours. The regional VP's solution? Did they, maybe, as the client relations manager suggested, offer not to charge these irate customers for their dedicated service being down? Of course not. That would have made sense. Instead they sent them COFFEE MUGS with the company logo on them.
My boyfriend left soon after.
But I still have a T-shirt that Verio printed up shortly after they took over. It was (I think) misprinted, and was supposed to have some pithy "call us for bandwidth" message on it. Unfortunately for them, the last few words were chopped off, and it just said, in big letters under the comapny logo:
"Thinking about the internet? Dont"
Why is this "unexpected"? (Score:1)
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Re:Like the streetcars (Score:1)
It is socialist! :P
Small ISP's did this to themselves 3 years ago... (Score:2)
I love cheering for the little guy, but they kinda dug their own grave.
Razzious Domini
Internet service is a commodity (Score:2)
The market for the mom'n'pop shop is dwindling. They have to either:
Grow their own 'large' business (and thus lower their service/support)
or
Offer a unique service, fit into a niche.
Otherwise people are just going to buy the cheapest. You generally can't offer cheap unless you have a large customer base, and few employees which generally means inferior service.
But then there's the whole other issue of what you feel service is. Large corporations can afford a multi-tier approach to service, and that is what generally is best for the majority of clueless users. It pains us because we know that everytime we call we have to go through 2-3 tiers before we get someone who knows as much as we do. Sure, we could get better service, but we would be paying more, and guess which most of us geeks choose: Good service/Low price?
-Adam
Saving the world one CR/LF at a time.
Web developer:
Resume [ubasics.com]
Caveat Emptor! (Score:1)
2 things haven't changed since the days of the chariots; 1) you gets what you pay for; 2) caveat emptor!
Re:Evil? (Score:2)
1) When companies merge or buy out services, it generally results that after sufficient time for the merger to settle down that the ratio of support staff/funding to customers is less than what it was of either company to start with. It seems a lot of these service companies believe that they can scale their support staff on the order of O(log N), as opposed to O(N). Recently, Ameritech/SBC got slammed for doing this after SBC bought them out; they cut support staff and now the companied company is getting an earful from irate utilities commissions in the midwest for bad service.
2) Mergering of services nearly almost always adjust to the lowest common demonator, based on the extent of the service. I know of small dialup ISP which offered a true 24/7 connection (that is, you can be dialed-up online at all times, save for necessary redials, and they wouldn't blink), and when bought out, this service option suddenly disappeared, forcing users to moderate their connect time to free the modem pool for others. One of the things I'm watching for is the vast differences in what you can do on the upstream end of your DSL line that exist between the providers - some allow nearly everything you can do and don't care if you saturate your upstream line, some say you can't even read certain sites on the net, much less use ip masq or services. When the DSL providers start to merge, it'll be interesting to see how they handle this service merging.
3) As a whole, Americans have grown adjusted to the fact that you can't get good service anymore; on the viscious circle, companies realize they don't need to worry about good service, and cut back, giving their customers even worse service. This is not just in the ISP/telecom industry, but all over the place. Gas stations allow you minimal if any interaction with the store clerk to avoid that hassle, supermarkets have options to bypass the cashier with self-scanning items, and the introduction of the ATM has made the teller person nearly obsolete -- nearly all of these innovations came about because those stores and businesses undercut their service staff, creating inefficient and poor service; the automated versions were created to aliviate that problem, but as more people opt for these automated services over the real person, the service personnel become deadweight, and service is cut back more...
I don't think there's really any way to get out of this trap of poor service leading to expect poor service, either.
Here's an ISP you might like... (Score:2)
they aren't as small as they used to be, but they still have a great touch. you used to be able to "write root" for immediate tech support
i am writing an app that's pretty DB intensive (mySQL), so i wrote to them asking for suggestions on how they'd recommend writing it to minimise the load on their servers. within 2 hours i had 2 responses from admins (the reply and a followup) covering different aspects of it. however that wasn't the best part. a *week* later, i get an email from an admin again, saying that as they've recompiled it and done some extra tweaks, what i would be doing shouldn't be a drain on resources anyway. now THAT's what i call service.
it's "web hosting for geeks". there wont be much help to "my internet is broken", you're left pretty much alone with a shell (but isn't that a dream come true?), but for any genuine problems, they're right on the ball. they've even written their own app for managing pop3 accounts, aliases, virtual domains, mysql databases and such.
ssh and telnet access, unlimited bandwidth, up to unlimited storage space, all linux or bsd servers... many more features, i'm not going to go on anymore, just go look at their website
http://www.csoft.net [csoft.net]
Fross
- a satisfied customer
Re:We're used to crap service (Score:1)
I have used local services but they all (get this) refuse to provide me with ISDN service that I can use all I want. When I mention wanting to leave the modem connected 24/7 they freak and tell me that if they see me on for more than a "reasonable time" at one clip they'll cut me off. It "ties up their lines." So I'm stuck paying a fortune to use SWBell who has nothing but 1st tier support; I'm not too sure anything past that exists there.
Re:Evil? (Score:2)
Your boyfriend, Dennis Miller, still has a late night talk show. It's on HBO.
I wouldn't really follow the teachings of Herr Miller as strictly as you do. He's just another pseudo-intellectual attacking those who dislike conventional wisdom.
Broadband is the death knell of the small ISP (Score:1)
However, when it comes to this sort of service, as long as the "evil corporation" provides the right level of service, I'm not worried. The bad ones will lose out since unsatisfied customers can always walk (I'd rather pay a touch more for a quality service than put up with a cheap, bad one). Even big telcos now have competition: It just takes one to differentiate on quality...
Re:Telco analogy (Score:3)
I owned one of the small ones (Score:5)
I owned and ran a small ISP for about six years. When we started out, big companies didn't do a very good job of getting people online. Getting the tcp/ip stack to work was often difficult, and strange modem problems were common. So there was a real niche for a company like ours, which could try to put more effort into getting people online.
And when people had problems, they could call or email us, and I'd pick up the phone. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I was the person who built the entire system, and I think I was probably able to give better support than the average support guy at a large ISP.
But times changed. If you buy a computer now -- almost any computer -- the odds are overwhelming that it's going to work. It's really easy to set up net service on a modern windows machine. After we sold our company, I went to the Earthlink site and signed up. I was online immediately, with no hassles. And they have access numbers all over the country. I've even used it in Paris. That's a big advantage. I think Earthlink does a good job.
When small ISPs were cannibalized by the large ones, it was very bloody. Customers were jerked around, email addresses were often forcibly changed, and the deals were always very bad for the guys who had the small ISPs. We were lucky -- we sold to another small ISP, and they've just added to our features, nothing was taken away. Not even the shell accounts.
Typically the large ISP wrote the contract -- they agreed to pay so much per customer, but only for the customers who stuck through the transitition. So when 1/3 of the customers dropped off, it was no skin off the big ISP's nose. They didn't have to pay for those people. And there are lots of horror stories about the big guys not paying the money that they owed legitimately, even under the lopsided contracts that they wrote.
We were approached over and over again by large ISPs who wanted to buy us. They would invariably change the terms at the end of the negotiation, and back out of comittments they had made to us. For the most part the guys who built those large ISPs through aquisition were bottom feeders, sharks who were trying to pick the bones of distressed small businesses. Most of them didn't seem like honest guys. So it was never surprising to me that guys like that didn't treat the customers well.
The real problem with the big players is that they're few in number and are vulnerable to pressure. A world with 100,000 mom and pop ISPs isn't as easy to wiretap as a world with 3 blue chip corporate ISPs. And every now and then Time/Warner/AOL or AT&T will say someting really scary -- like how they think that e-commerce people should pay them a commission, how they would be completely within their rights to block access to whatever sites they felt like blocking.
Big ISPs can provide good service, especially in a simpler world where things tend to interoperate more easily. But I don't feel confident that the market or the government will always protect consumers the way that they deserve.
In the old days they forced the guys who owned the movie theatres to sell the studios they owned. The wisdom of such a move isn't apparent to most people now. The "synergy" of having the pipe and the content is seen as a good thing.
I'm certain that we're going to see attempts to build copy protection into the net itself. I think they'll fail, but the companies will try. Those are the kinds of problems, I think, are going to be the real costs of the consolidation of the mom and pop ISPs into a small number of large companies.
Re:Ressurection? (Score:1)
Thank you, BasinNet (Score:5)
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
Re:Telco analogy (Score:1)
And where is broadband in this situation? Virtually non-existent. Cable modems just came into play here in the past year and they have a so-so reputation. (Tried it myself, it sucked. Upload speeds of 1k/sec.? Uh, no thanks!) DSL? Only available in a very, very limited area downtown, to be expanded in about 2 years. ISDN is the only choice where I am, and it's $200+ a month.
Is our market ripe for a "big player" to come in an offer something good for once? It seems there's only one city in the whole state that ever gets any of the new services. Our city has a population over 50,000. Are we the only decent sized place being forgotten?
We're used to crap service (Score:5)
As with everything it all depends on the circumstances. Smaller companies are (in general) far better at customer relations because they have more resources to spend per customer in this department, and the people running them depend on this for their livlihood so they're motivated to help. But a larger company can pass on economies of scale to it's customers in the form of reduced prices, special deals and so on.
It's all a matter of what kind of service you want - cheap or good. And let's face it, most people prefer to have a cheap service that they can then bitch about to one where they pay a lot more but get help. As a culture we're used to waiting half an hour on the phone for some support person who has no more idea about your problem than you do, so we've in a sense become inured to such treatment.
So I think that smaller ISPs aren't really a hugely viable concern. If they could work, I'd say it would be by catering to areas where a lot of help is needed that a large company won't provide - to nursing homes for instance. Otherwise people will try and save a few dollars everytime.
Re:Sigh - Re:Sigh (Score:1)
Capitalism does not necessarily imply corporations. You can have the benefits of capitalism without creating [corporations].
But can you? Sure, capitalism existed long before the state created the corporation. The mischief the legislature sought to address in creating the legal person of the limited liability corporation, however, was capitalism's inability to raise funds sufficient for the really large scale projects which became technologically possible following the industrial revolution.
Imagine investing in the joint-stock company of pre-corporate times. This is essentially a partnership, in which each investor is jointly and severally liable for the misdeeds of the company. Unlike investment in a limited liability corporation, where (as an investor) the most you can lose is your investment, the creditors of the joint-stock company could come after you (possibly you alone) and claim anything you owned until the debt was paid. Would you invest in such a non-corporate company? (So much for a world of pure contract.)
Sure the modern corporation might be said to be "evil" (inasmuch as this is appropriatetly predicated to a non-natural person), in that it exercises domination over natural individuals. In part this stems from the very ability to raise capital and the resultant conglomeration of power. Power which rivals (and nowadays even outstrips) that possessed by the state. Beyond this, the core aim of a corporation, to maximise the investment of abstract shareholders, means that it is legally oblidged to disregard the public interest where this diverges (except in some places [Massachusetts??] where the corporations law has been explicitly amended to allow 'socially beneficial' activities). People attack Phillip Morris for spending more on advertising about the charity they give out, than on that charity itself, for targeting favourite charities of key legislators etc etc. Aren't they are supposed to be ruthlessly pursuing the interests of their shareholders? (Truly pure corporate philanthropy is a dubious proposition -- how can the directors justify giving away money that belongs to the shareholders?)
You are right to stress that the corporation is not an inevitability. In fact it is the creation of legislatures, and the expression (to varying degrees in different countries) of the democratic process. It is in fact a semi-public thing -- limited liability is a subsidy granted to corporations by the people in return for the possiblity of large scale development. Now, when MegaCorp(tm)(c) threatens democracy itself, we should not ignore democracy's capacity to shape the corporation. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as you seem to be suggesting, we might want to consider ways in which corporate power can be tamed, without losing the benefits which limited liability, and its corollary, corporate personality, bestow.
On the other hand, perhaps we should have all really major devlopment under direct democratic control.   ;P
Re:yes, its sad, but what can we do?!? (Score:2)
ISPdotcom.com (Score:1)
Ressurection? (Score:2)
The only possibility I see for life after death is for individuals with very powerful computers and quick connections (being used for some other activity or job), allowing a small number of accounts on the machine to supplement their income. I would love a T1 to myself, but even if I could afford one, I wouldn't use up its capacity and could easily pass some on by allowing cheap or even free dial up accounts to friends and family.
Also what about co-operative style ISPs. A bunch of geeks getting together to purchase a shared T1? Possible or not?
ISP Home vs. ISP Corporate (Score:1)
<vent>
I am currently attemping to move off of our current 'Mom and Pop' ISP, who provides us ISDN service, to a national ISP with T1 service. Unforunately, my predecessor had our domain name in his name, and the current ISP. All I needed was a name change to be authorized by them. That's it. Nothing more. The local admin ended up calling president of MY company, to whine about what I wanted to do.
Hello?!? We're moving off you. I don't need your DNS. I don't need explanations on how a Domain Arbitration would be needed if someone not related to the company had complete control of the domain name (what moron would do that).
Of course, the president felt like 'mom' after all this. Nobody need that crap. Especially when they aren't required to know those details.
At least when I've asked the 'evil' corporations to do step 1, they didn't whine to my boss about steps 7 and 8.
</vent>
Re:Thank you, BasinNet (Score:2)
It's a function of Netscape, since with Konquor, once it reaches a certain point, everything just goes flat, and there's no more indentation...
That's about it...
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Re:Ressurection? (sic) (Score:1)
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- All your estrogen are belong to us!
Create a Non-profit ISP (Score:1)
http://www.lariat.org
It's a town that got together and set up their own ISP.
Re:I work at a Mom&Pop ISP... (Score:1)
www.redshift.com
Thank you, DodgeNet (Score:1)
Monkeybrains.net (Score:1)
-cor
Re:Evil? (Score:2)
No, that's not the show he means. Dennis Miller actually had a show that was syndicated a while back, that you could get for free, over the air.
Basically it was a clone of the Tonight show format, with a news segment and all the other fun stuff. After it went under, then he got the HBO gig, which led him to Monday Night Football, where he is, IMHO, as inconspicuous as a turd in a punch bowl. (I like Dennis Miller. I like Monday Night Football. I don't like the combination.)
Yeah, there's "room" (Score:2)
Sure, it's nice to be able to chat with a tech you know on IRC, but think about the math... how much are you paying? How many customers can he chat with? What does he need to be paid to make it worth his while?
If people wanted to pay $40 a month or so, maybe more of these ISP's could survive. But they (i.e. "we") don't want to pay that much. In fact, even the best dialup service is so miserable that most folks I know are using the free services when they need dialup access.
And in fairness, not all those little ISP's are any good. Some are pretty ragtag operations, and tech support is often provided by whoever is stupid enough to take the job. Yeah, I've had some good ones. But I recall one in particular, the classic small ISP started by a bunch of Linux geeks, really great guys. They had plenty of business (mostly corporate leased lines), but had a terrible time hiring qualified people, so they finally cashed in and sold out to Verio. More power to 'em, I say.
This is not about evil corporations gobbling up the little guy, it's about consumers saying they prefer low prices and consistency mediocre service. The Verios of the world have bailed out a lot of little ISPs and put some cash in the pockets of the folks who worked hard to start 'em. If the little guys couldn't sell out, they might just go broke, and that would truly suck.
Re:I worked for one of the small ones (Score:3)
I worked for a mom 'n' pop for a year (hiya, dethro!) and it was painful to watch the bigger ISP's circle us like a dying animal. But being so close to my clients (I was the webmistress) and having them know they could call me whenever, or knowing that you could call the president at home if your email went down, or page the sys admin at 3am, those kinds of things were really cool. Not to mention being able to stay late and play Q2 on the T1, muahahaha!
I've had friends who worked for the bigger companies, and I'm glad I never went that route. I'm dealing with Verizon right now in a frustrating attempt to get DSL at home, and their customer support is a fscking joke. When OH When will cable modems become available in my city?!
[Pardon my rant.]
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
I don't think it's all like that. (Score:2)
You paint the picture like they're all good operations tho. My isp (xmission.com) is an indepdent isp that just managed to be an excellent source of internet service, and is now the largest and oldest in the state. Quality persists. Companies get bought out for one of two reasons: They wanted to get bought out, or they had no choice but to get bought out. Greed or incompetence, either way.
I've seen a lot of little ISPs go down the toilet, and that's where most of them belonged.
Case in point: an outfit called Legacy Internet. These guys used to rent an office in a building i used to work in. My employer owned the whole building, and, being less than 100 yards from the CO, and with a frame relay circuit undernieth the parking lot (with conduit direct to the CO), you could have considered the building extremely wired. So a lot of ISPs rented unused office and closet space from us.
Legacy Internet advertised on their flyers that they would "Bring you the internet with the technology of Windows NT". Basically, they had two generic PCs in their office, one of them aparantly a web server, the other one with a big MUX next to it and a huge stack of loose generic modems. Oh, and a gigantic pile of NT how-to books next to the desk.
Legacy Internet was literally a mom&pop. A literal mom and a literal pop. They may have even been retired.
Almost invariably, if i was working late, they'd show up at about 6:30pm, with tired, frustrated faces, and groan over their how-to books and NT boxes.
For some reason they didn't have an actual phone in there, even though they had a great bundle of POTS lines. We had configured the phone in the lobby to have no dial tone. It worked fine if you dialed on it, it just had no dial tone. This was a surprisingly effective cost cutting measure. Before we did this, people would wander over from other businesses in the building and make long distance calls after hours.
So, anyway, one night I'm working late, and they're sweating over half a dozen NT How-To books, and it turns out they want to order a pizza.
One of them spent ten or fifteen minutes puzzling over the phone in the lobby. I walked past a few times picking up stuff from the printer. Finally, she asks me how to use the phone. So I say "Just select a line and dial" "But there's no dial tone" "There won't be a dial tone. Just select a line and dial" "What?" "It works fine, just select a line and dial your number"
Ten minutes later, utterly frustrated, she decided to walk out and get the pizza in person. Sad, sad, sad.
Legacy Internet is long gone, absorbed by a bigger, more competent company. Good riddance.
In comparison, the two other ISPs renting from us at the time, Aros.net and concentric.net, had far fewer troubles. Every three or four months some boxes would show up via FedEx for Concentric, a half hour later a technician would show up, install whatever was in the boxes, and leave. Aros was just using us as a backup emergency POP, and would send a technician out to manually busy-out a malfunctioning modem from time to time. Aros is still going strong, and everyone knows concentric.
It all boils down to competence, whether that's financial or technical. An independently owned ISP *can survive, if it has the requisite skill, and honestly wants to.
I got to witness the death of an ISP firsthand. (Score:2)
I worked for one such company here in northern CO for quite a while. Most of our problems were due to USWorst's line and switches servicing the rural boondocks...which we tended to cater to. But, personal customer service was prime. People would even bring their computers in for me to fix in the office. Well, a few years ago the owners decided it was time to get out of the business. Thus we got sold off to RMI.net (now IC&C). There happened to be about a dozen ma and pa ISP's that they purchased at the same time then, and all their customers went to the new company.
"We don't want to make a mistake like we did before, so you will have all the control over your customers" came the reassurance. "We wont be meddling with your business" was another. Of course, I'd heard such phrases before and began planning my escape route. And for the short time frame, things were just like before...just the checks were signed differently.
Sure enough, it only took them 5 months before massive layoffs. All the ma and pa ISP's employees got canned (well, less than 10 employees across then all stayed...but only for the final transition period, then they were gone too) including myself. Didn't mind, already had plan in place...plus I got a nice severance.
Now in the aftermath, the customer service and technical support is lacking...due to the fact that it is centralized in another state. Also, the companies main services are to big businesses, so all the residential customers kinda get crapped on. Heck, I had a dozen or so customers actually track me down a few months after I left looking for some help.
So it goes I guess. Probably only a matter of time before they hand all their residential customers over to ATT or Juno or AOHell.
I work for a Mom & Pop ISP... (Score:2)
Re:Call me stupid...... (Score:2)
The latter takes a bit more work, but if you have DSL or a cable modem, and didn't get rid of the second phone line, it can be done. With software like mgetty+sendfax, you can even justify it as a fax line. I've set up my own dial-ups under Linux before, and they could handle shell, PPP, and fax connections. If I'd had a bit more time, I would have figured out how to proxy-arp them to use fixed IPs from my /29 block instead of IP Masquerading.
The support ain't greener... (Score:2)
It's fun to look in on the cable newsgroup and see how badly it sucks, then go look on the DSL newsgroup and see how badly IT sucks.
My conclusion, the grass probably isn't any greener on the other side of the cable/DSL fence. Don't jump over based on any sort of generalized hearsay, whatsoever. Before changing, talk to someone who has been using the service for a while, somewhere near your area. My cable provider has some problems, and some of their service techs may be clueless, but the service is decent enough, and they do have some good service techs, so at the moment, I'm not inclined to jump.
People talk about upstream pipes being better for DSL than for cable, but I suspect that DSL ISPs are just as capable of oversubscribing their pipes as cable.
As bad as you think Verizon is, at least the ISP and the last mile are under the same company. I'm sure there's internal fingerpointing, but one company is responsible to you, and has to resolve that. If you had a different ISP, and Verizon had the last mile, they'd point fingers at each other forever.
About the only allure of DSL to me is the more reasonable AUP - cable 'discourages' running your own servers.
Re:compare/contrast book franchises/big ISPs work (Score:2)
[shameless plug]
It's the Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop, 2000-F Cheshire Bridge Rd, Atlanta. There's a Titan Comics next door, so you can spend both halves of your paycheck in one stop... :)
No, I'm just a satisfied customer; I live in Seattle now, so I can't even go there anymore. Dangit.
[/shameless plug]
--
Support your local business establishment.
Re:Roll Your Own Net Access (Score:2)
If you're a Mom&Pop ISP in the right market (small town, rural), you can do very well for yourself. Until your town becomes big enough to make it onto the national players' radar screens.
Matt Barnson
The reason for the mom&pop services... (Score:2)
However, now that a large number of people can pick up a dsl line for less than $100 a month, the need to recover the cost is gone, as well as the need for expensive T1 lines. Thus the mom&pop services don't exist because the specific itch they used to scratch just doesn't exist anymore.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
yes, its sad, but what can we do?!? (Score:2)
In Australia, the "big 4" isps dominate the market, deciding bandwidth costs for the smaller ones, and basicall last year i was forced to leave my nice friendly isp, were they knew me by name, there was a closly nit group of people on the newsgroups and irc channels from that isp.. i was forced to leave because of the costs that they offered ($35au - for 250mb 56k VS $70au - unlimited cable - 100kb cap)...
I still look forward to the day i can come back to them (if/when they get adsl) - but im not sure they can survive much longer - with the current rate of customers leaving, and probably before long the big take overs happening in the US will come here..
im afraid, in this commercial free market economy this is bound to happen, until we have only one or two big companies in each industry, thats what is so wrong with the current economic systems, and there is nothing we can do!
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
Re:We're used to crap service (Score:2)
i had this exact problem with my ISP's gateway doing funny things with my outbound UDP packets. I spent hours identifying the problem, and all they did was tell me that they wouldn't support me because the Cable Modem happened to be connected via. a hub. Even when I explained it was a problem at their end, the tech didn't even know what a gateway was I hate clueless tech support.
I worked for one of the big ones... (Score:4)
Evil? (Score:5)
The goal of any business is providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market. I would be interested in hearing how exactly this is supposed to be evil. "Because I don't like it" isn't a valid argument: if there's no seller, there can be no buyer, and if there aren't enough buyers, then there can be no seller. That's why large corporations are dominant in the market, because they sell what buyers want.
Economics of an ISP (Score:2)
The little guys are often making more profit per line than the big guys. No M&A charges, no big advertising budget, etc. But being big improved your access to capital, at least during 1997-2000.
Customer service. (Score:2)
The fact that smaller ISP's are being swallowed up by larger companies will reduce the amount of ISP's we have to choose from if we do decide to change ISP. But, so long as one company doesn't gain a monopoly over all ISP's then we will still have a choice. As with any company we buy goods and/or services from, it is up to us to let them know when we are not happy.
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Re:Death of shell accounts? (Score:2)
What's concerning to me, and one of the reasons I gave in after years of sticking by, and being forced to switch ISPs during mom & pop sellouts, is the fact that in order to get DSL or cable access, one has to pay both the wire carrier AND the ISP. Which brings out the anti-competitive worst in companies like AT&T, TW, and the Bells offering DSL. They simply price a packaged line + web/mail account at one point, say $50, and then-- knowing that no local ISP can afford to or will price their web/mail at $10-- they price the line alone at something like $40.
Throw in the idea of having to deal with the hassle of two separate companies (no matter how nice and small one might be) seems distasteful compared to simply going with the lowest common denominator. And I can't see too many reasons why I would want to pay a small ISP to be involved in my transaction at all.
Re:More BasinNet versus AOL! (Score:2)
it sucks to share the pipe with other people who have no restrictions on how much Porn they can download. Those 'wide open' providers are nice if you're a bandwidth hog. They suck for everybody else.
No worse than the average teenage with Napster on any broadband connection.
Worse Is Better strikes again (Score:2)
What I want is a pipe. Very simple. Give me always-on access that doesn't go down every morning, give me a static IP -- just one! -- and I'll be happy. They could even throw in a nameserver as a "value-added" service; I'd pay for that.
Instead I get a connection that goes down two hours a day ("some customers in Massachusetts may be experiencing difficulties" says the hold message, and tech support says the same thing and doesn't have a clue when I use words like "traceroute"), but (ooh! yippy-skippy!) it's cheap and comes with "web space" and "free web e-mail".
I don't care about Evil Big Corp vs. Mom and Pop. I don't care about Tech Support. I just want a frickin' reliable pipe with a static IP. Not a hard request. I'm willing to pay, but nobody is selling!
I'm a good customer -- simple demands, low support cost, disposable income, and infinitely loyal if you give me what I want because I'm generally too lazy to change. Companies should be jumping over each other to sell what I want. Who broke capitalism?
--G
economics (Score:2)
If there was a market for high quality consumer support ISPs, wouldn't there be any in an efficient market place?
Consumers want cheap bandwidth and pay nothing, right? Large ISPs have scale benefits that make them price competitive to small ISPs. Most small ISPs that I've seen are/were not making money for the hours they are/were putting into it.
In emerging markets with strong growth such as the ISP market with huge number of consumers going on-line you see a large shake-out of ISPs that are not price competitive, or they sell-out for large amount of money to a large ISP that wants their customers. Is that so strange?
Johan.
Speakeasy: Get big, think small. (Score:2)
Speakeasy started out as an internet cafe in Seattle's Belltown district. You could pop in, grab a latte, sit down at a refurbished Wyse 50, and get your email and read news. An account is still $10 a month. They got big. Really big. They partnered with Covad and some dialup providers, and went nationwide. The service is still great (yeah, I have DSL, but I keep seeing things go by about how they're constantly working at improving the dialup pool, and while I was waiting for Qwest to get off their butts and get me a dry line, I used Speakeasy's dialups, which always connected at 43.3 with only a few minor hiccups... ), and you can still go down to Belltown and grab a latte and a terminal (or a PC or a Mac, for that matter).
No, I'm just another satisfied customer. I sure hope they don't ever sell... hopefully they're big enough in their own right now that they can keep going without getting swallowed.
Oh, one more thing: Their infrastructure... is all LINUX. Right here in the backyard of the Beast. (yes, they'll let you run Windows on their network... but they're very Linux-friendly. They have all the HOWTO's and magic numbers on their support pages, and they love it if you run NAT. They'll even secondary your DNS if you put up a primary on their network.)
Try not to slashdot'em too bad, folks, I'd rather not see them buried by enthusiasm... :)
Telco analogy (Score:4)
The barriers to entry seem to have grown.
Am I wrong about this? Are the days of local ISP's numbered?
Little ISPs have to grow...working for one (Score:2)
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:Ressurection? (Score:2)
----------------------------
Re:I worked for one of the big ones... (Score:2)
Re:We're used to crap service (Score:3)
I get great service every time I go to Gelson's, and I don't pay much more than I do at a normal market. Needless to say, I go there often.
So why do we accept poor service from ISPs? I think because a lot of us want service when we travel, and that makes local companies a non-starter.
However, my ISP is UUNET, because I'm willing to pay more to get better service, and I do - I can get access to a qualified engineer to work on my problem within seconds. They're a big national company, but thank goodness they don't act like one. The only problem is they still have to deal with crummy local DSL providers - anyone try to deal with Covad lately? I switched to Rhythms, and they're a little better, but not much.
D
----
Not an ISP-specific issue (Score:2)
The things you just don't see anymore... (Score:2)
Re:oversubscribing their pipes (Score:2)
*sigh* At least I'm on so I don't have to stay late at the office anymore just to check my damn email.
"I'm not a bitch, I just play one on
Re:Conventional wisdom? There's no such thing. (Score:2)
Re:compare/contrast book franchises/big ISPs work (Score:2)
There are some book stores that have survived, but they have to specialize in order to do so: Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA and The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, CA are good examples of this.
Some independent bookstores like Cody's in Berkeley and one in the North Beach section of San Francisco (I think it's called Northern Lights) survive because of their strong, always-returning clientele.
But like it or not, the superstore age is here to stay. The small, independent stores just cannot compete against the like of Wal-Mart, Price/Costco, Home Depot, etc. because the superstores can get volume discounts on a vast scale.
But getting back on topic
Re:my first employer in IT... (Score:2)
So one day I get asked to call this one group and give them a hand setting up their email. And it's a group for the blind. Fortunately they had a sighted volunteer there, though, so I talked to him. Unfortunately, he was...um..."developmentally challenged"...and this group had just moved into new offices, and the computer desk wasn't completely set up yet (let alone anything else in the office by the sound of it).
I was trying to talk this guy through setting his DNS servers in Win95, and it was painful. It took 1h40m -- no lie -- and the conversation was full exchanges like this:
Me: Okay, now move the mouse over to the window that's just popped up.
Him: [strange grunting sounds, lasting a full minute] Uh...okay.
Me: [switch back from reading Slashdot] Okay, now look for the button that says "Properties".
Him: [strange grunting noises, and the sound of the mouse moving against his pants...the desk isn't set up yet, remember]
Me: [bored] Have you found it yet?
Him: [strange grunting noises that last a full minute] Um...what?
I got him to put in one DNS number; after that I just gave up. I think it worked, though...
More BasinNet versus AOL! (Score:2)
Quoted from article.
These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC.
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
I'll bet that BasinNet is also the sort of ISP that will give you a shell account.
Love to see that at AOL. Can you imagine the average AOL user accidentally hitting the (non-existent) "Shell Prompt" button on NEW! AOL 6.0! SO EASY TO USE, NO WONDER IT'S #1!. Meltdown.
We're losing all the ISPs that don't pander to the lowest common denominator.
There is light on the horizon, however: how about a Toronto-area DSL provider that charges $34.95/mo for residential 1.2Mbps DSL, and will give you as many static IPs as you want for $5/mo more each... :)
They allow you to run whatever servers you want at home. Mail, DNS, web, etc.
Their customer service sucks, yeah, it's PPPoE, and yeah, their reliability was very poor when I started with them in June. But it's been getting gradually better.
www.dsl.ca [www.dsl.ca]
Hooked.net > Wenet > ClearData > Hell (Score:2)
Yet another "I worked for one" (Score:2)
My experience, however, is not simply limited to tech support for the greater missouri area. I also had the displeasure of working for a national provider (rhymes with AOHell
The biggest difference between the two was personal accountability. When you work for an ISP that only has something like 10,000 customers, you can't afford to treat a single customer like shit. These people wind up calling back often (we all know the type of people who can't be pleased, or are dumb as rocks), and if you provide crappy service to a person in a small town, half the time you risk losing all customers in that town - i've seen it happen. At AOHell, it didn't matter. hell, AOL employs more tech support workers than that local ISP had customers. It didn't matter if you were a dick about something, the odds were strongly in your favor that the customer would never speak with you again, and %99.9 of them never even remembered the first name of the tech they spoke with. There was no personal accountability.
On the other side, there was also a question (very prominent these days) about legal procedings. There was only so much we were allowed to do when working for AOHell. Anything that wasn't explicitly supported was an absolute no-no. I worked in the windows side of the house, so troubleshooting even the simplest mac problems, or even a simple *nix question was forbidden. If i was talking to a customer who needed a CD and it came to light that they lived less than a mile from my call center, it was, of course, absolutely off-limits for them to come down and get one from us, much less even be told where our call center was specifically located. The local ISP i used to work for? We kept a store-front office for just such purposes. People would come down and drop off their bill, or even come buy to pick up install diskettes. Local dialups are allowed to play it much more loose because of the likelihood of getting sued. Just as you are required to know the customer, the customer knows you. A sort of mock-friendship evolves, and you don't have to worry about it. Places like AOL have never seen a day without some pissed off customer who got called an asshole by a tech suing them for everything they can get their grubby little hands on. The bigger the target, the greater the likelihood of getting sued, the greater the protections that must be put in place.
The bottom line is this: National ISP's don't know or care about the customer because A)they can't, and B) they're not expected to. There's a huge difference between talkin' to some woman named Yolanda in Batton Rouge that you know you'll never speak to again, and talking to Aunt May from down the street who you'll probably see the next time you go to the grocery store.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
Re:Ressurection? (Score:2)
Death of shell accounts? (Score:2)
It seems like shell access is an endangered species, as ISPs prefer lower maintenance web / email only type of accounts.
One of my shell ISPs, panix.com [panix.com], recently picked up a lot of ex-netcom users once that ISP dropped shell access.
Re:Customer service. (Score:2)
----------------------------
Customer Serive Lagging Everywhere (Score:2)
Businesses try to take market share leading to customer service being pushed aside. As customers we all have to make it a priority to push larger corporations to improve their customer service.
What I've found that works:
Most importantly don't back down. The people answering the phones can't make policy, but their job description generally allows them to pass the buck to a supervisor. Eventually you annoy enough people up the chain of command that changes occur. If bad customer service stats build up, higher ups will have to start listening.
Yes there is. (Score:2)
Is there still room for the small-time ISP in today's market or has dial-up internet become solely the realm of big-time providers?
"
My ISP (Kotiverkko Yhdestys, or Domenstic Network Association)in Espoonlahti, Finland, has no more than about 80 members. In order to avoid tax issues, it's an 'association' and is not allowed to make a profit. I pay the telco twice as much as the ISP despite the fact the ISP provides the IP infrastructure, yet the telco only provides 4 copper-copper conections, which took 5 minutes to set up, and no maintainance. I have to provide my own modems and router, but they're quite cheap ($500 for 2Mb/s modems)
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Crapola (Score:2)
Re:Thank you, BasinNet (Score:5)
Thank you AOL.
Being Competitive (Score:2)
At the advent of DSL, my ISP was the first to locally provide DSL service (other than GTE). Having the most bandwidth in my city makes them the main ISP to buisnesses and the largest local DSL provider. I now use cable provided by @home because unfortunately DSL hasn't quite reached my neighborhood. After only one month of usage I can not believe the terrible service (slow connects, mail servers down) and the poor quality of their customer support. It really makes me miss my old ISP and I am ready to switch to DSL as soon as it is available.
I know most of my old ISP admins. Hell, I've been down to my ISP several times to do things such as buy some cheap CAT-5 for my network. I still talk to them regularly on IRC.
The key to their survival is simply because they can provide a better service than national ISPs. They never have any hold times and their admins know the service well so they can provide excelent customer support. They have more bandwidth than the phone company does here and can provide a better DSL service than the phone company.
Re:OT... (Score:2)
I'm inclined to think they're better than Covad (that saying virtually nothing, of course), and I'd probably use them again - my house just seems to be in an exceptionally poor situation for internet connectivity.
D
----
Re:Thank you, BasinNet (Score:2)
Gelson's (way off topic) (Score:2)
Bristol Farms is great, too, but unfortunately I don't have one nearby.
D
----
Microeconomics 101 (Score:3)
Whenever the "barriers to entry" (i.e. initial fixed costs) of running a business are low, then many people go into business and compete with each other. Due to this competition (competition==good thing), profits become lower and lower. Finally, the razor thin profit margins means that only a large corporation can make any substantial profits, driving the smaller companies out of business.
The same thing will happen with online shops. The larger shops, perhaps one with brick and mortar counter-parts will eventually squeeze out the little shops. This is because etailing has some of the lowest barriers to entry that I've seen.
Moral of the story? Don't feel bad about it. It's inevitable that we will all play our roles as consumers, which causes this whole thing to happen. Since the internet is still a relatively 'new' business medium, these little kinks have yet to be worked out.
Re:Evil? -- The goal of any business is (Score:3)
Usually, one good way to do this is "providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market."
But you can often make more money, more easily, by buying up the competition, or running it out of business, then essentially force the consumers to buy your product. Your 'limiting price' then is no longer set by competition, but rather by the barrier of entry cost for someone else to become competition. This is usually a much higher number.
Alternatively, you can keep the price static, and reduce the product. (ie: cut your service) It amounts to pretty much the same thing.
We still have a local ISP here in Vermont, SoverNet. We used to have another local ISP, Together Net, which was bought by OneMain, which was bought by EarthLink. Unfortunately, in order for me to get Bandwidth, SoverNet was not an option, so I'm with an evil corporation.
the corporatisation of the isp world (Score:2)
over a year ago the company was bought out by one of our customers, who wanted to build an isp facet to their business. from the start, the new management was indifferent at best. they were obviously intent on becoming a large corporation, and that focus was all wrong for the way we (the original isp) did business. however, we managed to remain mostly autonomous for quite a while, and things were not bad.
then, another isp - based in ontario - that the parent company had also bought out, started taking over our operations, and in fact the president of that company became president of the parent. at that point, things began *very* rapidly going downhill. this was a larger provider who had built their own business with a commodity approach.. which they immediately tried to force on us. they offer packages, and nothing outside of packages. and to tell the truth, the packages are not very good; i was unable to get most of the sites i'd worked on, with any kind of complexity to them, to work on the new isp's servers.
now all the technical staff has left. i left specifically because the commodity isp had literally no idea what to do with me; my forte is custom solutions and i just didn't fit their modus operandi. i also left for the same other reasons as everyone else, which boils down to the fact that we were unable to keep customers happy in light of what was going on, and we had no resources to draw on to make things happen, as no one at the new parent company ever seemed to listen to us *at all*. it's incredibly discouraging to work in that sort of environment; also, to be someone who cares about whether or not the customer's needs are met, and to be totally incapable of seeing to that.
and now, all their customers with any sort of needs above the extremely basic are running out the door. they're unable to get any sort of support. before i left, i talked to one of the managers of the original parent company, who even *stated* baldly that they didn't mind losing the customers who didn't fit into the new scheme.
this, to me, is the corporate (or, corporate wannabe) experience. now i do everything i can to avoid it. i think we as a society *need* to learn the limitations of corporatisation, and we need to learn them *soon*. i've been an avid reader of science fiction all my life, and one theme that's been pretty prevalent in many novels and stories is that of the future mega-corporations that control everyday life. with that background reading, current developments take on a very sinister tinge. it saddens me that most of the world seems simply to accept that's going on.
I work at a Mom&Pop ISP... (Score:3)
In terms of the previous post about the underlying infrastructure providing cheaper service, this is true. Our main competitor to DSL sales is PacBell herself. She can offer it cheaper, but the service is cheaper. PB uses PPPoe and/or DHCP, almost like a modem pool, while we assign everyone a static, public (or private if they choose) IP.
The funny thing is, whenever someone calls in and says "well PB is cheaper by $x amount," they don't understand the tech side of it and go towards PB. The kicker: a large percentage of our DSL sales come from ex-PB customers who had to wait 4 months for an install or 1 hour on hold to change their password. They say "why didn't anyone tell me, they're terrible!" and I hold my breath thinking "We told you so." There's complete domains and websites dedicated to PB horror stories.
And one last thing. Our company president who started this company did it all himself from a closet, like many start-ups. The cool thing is, he actually knows all about ISDN problems and occasionally helps us down here in tech. I remember the last time I was having trouble with an ISDN customer and she started getting bitchy. After putting her on hold for a minute or two (I swear!) I told her "ok, our company president is looking into this personally and logging into the router now."
Dead silence...
Not just customer support is lost... (Score:2)
Well, many months later, they finally get around to moving the servers from the local systems to the OneMain systems. Now, they're cutting down on services being offered, including the one main service that I had been using for the last 9 years--shell access. Of course they're blaiming it on Earthlink's policies, but when they migrated servers, suddenly mail access via shell (which I was counting on with all the international travel I do) had been cut off, leading me to believe that it was a planned move.
It's my belief that soon it'll just be big companies that provide nothing beyond dialup/DSL connections, email (funny how you can get accounts with 10's of email addresses these days), some webspace, and, like in the case of AOL, a community of sorts in chatrooms and games and such. Seems like we're sliding back to the days before the Internet was big where everyone who was 'connected' were on AOL, Compuserv, etc.
Just my 2 bits (that plus 6 more will get you a byte).
Grei
Re:Evil? (Score:3)
Statistically, the #1 factor in the average person's decision on which car to buy is color. This is sad. Most people would rather have a [whatever_color] car than have a car that gets good gas mileage or one with an acceptable repair history. It's the same sort of thinking that leads people to want to buy a gateway computer because it "has the internet." Corporations are evil because they thrive off and promote this kind of backward mentality.
Do you remember when Dennis Miller had a late night talk show? It was cancelled. Do you know why? Not because of bad ratings. It was because they couldn't sell ad time. Corporations didn't want to buy ad time because the demographic that watched Dennis Miller's show was too intelligent. The general viewer of that show was too well informed and was not as likely to be influenced by slick advertising, so it was not worth it to run commercials during his show.
Sure, you may say, this is sound business thinking. Well, I say, if this is a good corporate decision, then corporations are ulitimately evil for promoting the lowest common denominator in our society.
also true in hosting (IPP) (Score:2)
My company [spinweb.net] is a small IPP and my partners and I have bemoaned the way our industry is getting tacky. We do what we do because we enjoy it. Fortunately we can also make a living doing it, so we feel blessed, however much of our competition tries to stuff as many users on a box as possible and provide a meager FAQ as support. I'll admit up front that less interaction with clients usually results in better margins, but that seems to be a really shallow business model.
So, what do we do about this? Aside from everyone hosting with my company (just kidding), I think that we should support local and small businesses of all sorts. If personal service matters to you, be willing to pay a 10-15% premium for it. Someone out there is willing to sacrifice your peace of mind for a buck, but in my opinion it is a poor trade. Of course, when doing business with smaller organizations you should be prepared to ask plenty of questions to make sure their service is right for you, but then this is what I would recommend for doing business with any sized organization.
While on this topic, if you are shopping around for an ISP or IPP the best way to judge their level of service is to send a sales question to their support email. If you don't get a response then you can assume their support people are understaffed and didn't want to pass along the request to sales, thereby increasing their load. If you get a reply, and better yet a prompt one, you can assume that support is well staffed and cared for.
I work for a surving isp (Score:3)
The company I work for is NETDOOR. We've managed to survive, and just opened our own colocation making us the only local isp in MS to have one. People still enjoy good service, we have our own techs (no one is subletted). The president of the company is not only an incredible business exec, but a great admin as well along with the other talented admins.
So far NETDOOR has had a few offers to sell, but none have been accepted. I think we have survived and grown due to our service and equiptment. We have 3 backbones through UUNET Cable and Wireless and Sprint. Plenty of redundancy and extra equitment. So if something breaks there is a backup. These are the things that make us the best
The article said it in a nutshell why these isp's die. They wanted to be like AOL. I don't think it's a good idea to try to get that big. The odds are definitly against you. I've seen far to many companies try to get too big to fast. From what I understand NETDOOR doesn't even plan on trying to expand out of Mississippi.
It's sad to see these ISP's shrivil up and die, but I think in the end there will still be a few left. Maybe the customers from these dead isp's will help keep the others profittable by moving to "mom and pop" isp's that have a chance. ISP darwinism.
Re:Telco analogy (Score:3)
The problem right now is that in order to do broadband Internet access, you need the infrastructure in place to do this. That, alas, is extremely expensive and small ISP's cannot get the money to get access to these lines for their customers.
Note that here in the Bay Area, only SBC-approved ISP's get access to DSL connections (Earthlink, Prodigy.net, PacBell Internet and a few others). And of course the only approved ISP for cable modems is Excite@Home.
City of Laramie, Wy (Score:3)
They even have wireless access downtown.
Re:Ressurection? (Score:2)
Of course we don't have people who download a lot. I think that the average slashdotter should opt for (A/S)DSL. But our 'customers' simply want 24x7 email, host small web servers that generate maybe ten hits a day, and browse a little. They're happy.
Re:Evil? (Score:2)
Re:City of Laramie, Wy (Score:3)
Roll Your Own Net Access (Score:4)
While you can sit around and gripe, the other option is to get togetther with a few of your friends, and start your own service.
While this may seem a bit outrageous, it is not that impractical. The Register [theregister.co.uk] has this story [theregister.co.uk] about Laramie, Wyoming, where they run their own non-profit community wireless Internet service called Lariat [lariat.org] (Laramie Internet Access and Telecommunications). It includes high-speed Net access service for a fraction of the price of most services in the US.
The initial cost was about $3,000. Many residents donating their own PCs. Normal dial-up service is $5 a month, $20-$30 a month for high speed (10MB/second). Businesses can now get T1 wireless or SDSL for fee $125 monthly
Information on how to set up a similar enterprise can be found on the lariat [lariat.org] site.
Re:compare/contrast book franchises/big ISPs work (Score:3)
I think the problem with the mom and pop ISP's is that they don't have the money and/or resources to get access to high-speed Internet connections such as DSL lines, cable modem lines, satellite dish systems or the new line-of-sight wireless antenna systems. It's only the big companies that have the resources to put up these methods of Internet access to your home.
Been through this twice (Score:2)
io.org got taken over by some conglomerate and the service started sucking, so I went over to the OTHER big indie ISP, interlog.com.
Interlog rocked: 10M disk space, shell account, great news service, lot's of knowledgeable people on the phones, etc. The place was started by some 20 year old, and his big thing was having great service, so people flocked to his ISP.
They grew, got lots of happy customers, and eventually the founder got bought out by PSI net when they made him a substantial offer. This was at the same time PSI was buying out lots of other indie ISPs across Canada.
Suffice it to say, very quickly after PSI Net bought them out, services started to get cut, *very* quickly: shell went, then was given back, *very reluctantly*, after lots of complaints; disk space went down to 5M without much prior notice, and all tech support was relegated to friggin Ottawa!
I still have my minimal account at Interlog, becuase my email address there is known by all my friends dating back a good number of years. This spring I'm going to kill the account for good, and stick with DSL through Sympatico. They're pretty goddamn incompetant as well (see www.sympaticousers.org for some horror stories, esp with ADSL) but there's few options for where I live, and I'll be damned if I go to Roges@Home!!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
Re:We're used to crap service (Score:2)
of course, you can predict the reason: all because i happened to have a non-microsoft-or-apple operating system directly attached to the cable-modem. (linux, openbsd, whatever instead)
in the end, i found a mole in time warner's administration ranks that actually understood that i was only calling when i was absolutely positive there was nothing wrong with my own equipment (and this guy was partial to the open-source operating systems). once i got that guy to trust me, i kept asking to speak to him every time (a problem because he was in 3rd tier support).
of course, that guy is long gone (everyone good is long-gone from time warner, it appears).
Peter
It's true. Bigger is not always better. (Score:2)
Re:Evil? (Score:2)
It's evil because the big corporations are eating the companies that sold the product I liked and replacing it with a product I don't like. It's a reduction of service without me having had any choice at all in the matter.
my first employer in IT... (Score:3)
There were only four employees besides the owner and his wife. Three of us had advanced degrees in the humanities: me with a MA in philosophy, and two guys with MFAs in creative writing. We ran on a mix of Digital Unix and SCO. SCO was gradually replaced with FreeBSD. It gave me a chance to learn systems adminstration and Perl. (Many thanks to Ken McCleaft for the best advice I ever got: "learn vi".)
Eventually it was swallowed up by U.S. Internet, which prompted me to quit, as my position was going to change from technician to sales. I gave up some stock options that turned out to be utterly worthless. But my experience there got me a job as an entry level Unix sysadmin.
U.S. Internet was swallowed up by One Main, who was then swallowed up by Earthlink, who then merged with Mindspring.
Anyway, phone tech support sucked, but we had fun, and I learned a lot. The Mom 'n' Pop ISP was a great place to get started in a computer career, for those of us who studied Liberal Arts in college.
And for those of you wondering: yes, it really was just like "User Friendly". My funniest tech support moment was talking to this elderly woman, setting up Windows 95 dial-up networking. We got to the point in the wizard where you enter the phone number, and I tell her "Enter 555-7000". I hear from the other end "Beep beep beep boop boop boop boop", as she presses the keys on her touch tone phone. I had to put her on hold while I fell into a fit of laughter.
Thanks Louis, June, Ken, Mare, Craig, and Mike. And Neil who got me the job in the first place.
--
Disappearing ISPs (Score:2)
It isn't so surprising that smaller ISPs are getting scooped up by larger ones. It's a quick way to build a company. Especially if you're looking to go into a geographic area where you currently have no presence.
But in St. Louis, my company has had to scramble to cover our clients in the face of ISPs that just roll over and die without so much as a notice. This has happened at least four times in the past three months and each time the provider simply pulled up stakes, and turned off their service. And each time we get panicked calls from mutual clients that their Internet service is down. Then, of course, it's a mad dash to route them to a new ISP in a reasonable time.
And very often it isn't dial-up services that disappear. It seems that DSL oriented providers are biting it as well. Soon, there will probably be only three or four providers suitable for business Internet access in my area. The biggest? SouthWestern Bell.
We're not dead yet. :) (Score:3)
We're still alive and kicking, although the outlook is entirely different than it was 18 months ago. At the time, we couldn't add modem pools fast enough (Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) wasn't very fast at accomodating us).
Suddenly, new dialup customers slowed dramatically and our investment in DSL turned out to be a wise one. I don't think any ISP will survive long without offering DSL. While DSL has it's own problems which every Verizon Sucks web site will tell you about, it should help keep us alive. Time Warner opening up their cable network to independent ISPs is also a good thing (but they're all talk at the moment).
We're not dead. We're far from it. It's sad to see the industry change so quickly so fast, but the bright side is that I have DSL now instead of a 56k. *shrug*
Re:Microeconomics 101 (Score:4)
Ummm, no. Or, at least, not necessarily. There are substantial diseconomies of scale associated with business, and in a service business like the ISP business, there are few or none of the economies of scale that are associated with manufacturing businesses.
For example, the total tech support payroll at the small mom-and-pop (I'm the "pop") ISP that I own [brokersys.com] is smaller than SWBell's payroll for tech support managers. Those tech support managers don't provide tech support, but they do add to the cost of providing tech support. Therefore, tech support is easier to afford for the smaller ISP than for a company like SBIS.
Of course, the razor thin margins are there and cause failures, but the companies that tend to fail are those that borrowed a bunch of money, (or sold a bunch of stock,) often to buy up smaller companies, and have discovered that they can't make enough beyond their overhead to make the interest payments. In this case, the small ISP's are the ones being bought, not the ones doing failing
Anyway, two things have been obvious to me for some time. First, providing access to the Internet to individuals is not going to be a license to print money, like people were thinking it was going to be five years ago. As you say, the barriers to entry are too low for that to happen. So, the successful ISP will need to focus on other areas to make most of their profits. What Brokersys tries to do is to have the dial-up stuff to pay for its share of the fixed cost, but we make most of our profits on other things. Second, many people will pay a premium to buy their Internet from a smaller company. It is, therefore, a mistake for a small ISP to try to price themselves like the big discounters.
Re:Evil my FOOT (Score:2)
Where did the retro-liberals go for there to be a need for "neo" liberals? Its akin to using words like paradox and proactive; those are words stupid people use to sound important.
The notion for instance that large corporations should have some degree of accoutability can be seen in many ideologies, including for instance Keynsianism, which was the a commonly held believe even in the US for a while.
The ideas that Maynard Keynes popularized are still around. Ever heard of demand side economics?
Re:Call me stupid...... (Score:2)
But whats the advantage of having a shell account? I think I'm just looking at it from the perspective of; if you already run a *nix box, you've got a shell there. I can see someone wanting one if they run a Windows box, but whats the advantage of having a shell account?
Because you're not always *at* your Unix box. I can't count the number of times I've been at a friend's house, who only had a Windows PC, and needed to do a tracroute/nslookup/etc. (granted, Windows is a lot better about including these tools than they used to be, but I still prefer the full-blown Unix versions).
Because if you're troubleshooting, it can be invaluable having a machine that's part of another network. At my current job, there are very often questions along the lines of "Does such and such only work this way on our network, or does it do the same thing from the outside?" Similarly, the network at my job is firewalled pretty restrictively -- I can't even ping or traceroute outside machines from any of the systems outside the firewall. Similarly, if I decide I want to spend my lunch hour hanging out on IRC, I like being able to do so without using company cycles.
Because if you're also maintaining some sort of web/ftp space on the same account, it's *much* easier being able to manage files from a full-blown shell then by doing it all through an ftp client (renaming files, changing permissions, quick edits of text files, etc.)
Because I still prefer having a full-blown mail client like mutt or pine that I can use anywhere. Espescially since a lot of ISPs don't support IMAP, I've had to sometimes resort to things like telnetting into port 110 of a POP server and reading my new mail by hand (user username / pass password / list / retr 1 / quit).