Well, after having had DSL installed, the first week or so went quite well--throughput was good, latency was low, and the connection remained up and stable during that time. Unfortunately, however, this was not to remain the case for long.
Side note: when I sent mail to Flashcom's hostmaster to ask him to change my reverse DNS entry to dragon.redballoon.net from an xxx.dsl.flashcom.com hostname, he complied within a day (which was a tad slow, but not offensively so). The upsetting part was that he sent a "request completed" reply email message in HTML. Grr. I found it very disconcerting that someone who really should know better was sending HTML email to customers.
The first major sign of trouble, however, came on the evening of November 12, when, for the first time, I attempted to access Flashcom's news server to read various usenet groups. I was not planning to have need to use Flashcom's news server, but the various other places where I had shell access and where I ordinarily read news were all having news problems that weekend.
I had actually hoped to avoid reading news through Flashcom, since they have outsourced their usenet news service to Supernews. This is both good and bad, since Supernews is a full-time news service provider and consequently has a good incoming feed and has reasonable reliability. On the other hand, since the bulk of Supernews' business comes from individuals who subscribe to their service in order to download complete multipart files from the *.binaries.* groups, their bandwidth appears to be somewhat maxed out and their news performance for interactive use is known to be less than stellar; for example, when reading an article, it might take 5-10 seconds for me to advance to the next article in a thread by hitting "n" or spacebar in trn. Worse, they specifically disallow users from running "suck" feeds, which would have been the reasonable workaround for the performance difficulties, since I could just run INN and suck on my own machine and have my own mini-news-server.
When I first tried to connect to news.flashcom.com, I kept getting the following error:
dragon:~$ telnet news.flashcom.com 119
Trying 207.126.101.100...
Connected to corp.supernews.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
502 too many connections from realm FlashCom (64.188.139.236)
Connection closed by foreign host.
Since this is not a common error, I called Flashcom's technical support line. After waiting on hold for about 20 minutes, I finally spoke to someone who was totally incompetent. He kept insisting that I somehow needed an email account with Flashcom in order to read news; I had never bothered to set up an email account with Flashcom because I knew that I would never use it and was not about to waste my time in setting one up now. The incompetent support person could not understand the concept of my inability to read news as being related to refused connections on port 119 of news.flashcom.com (aka corp.supernews.net). Further, he claimed that there was "no one" else whom I could speak to about this, though he agreed to fill out a trouble ticket to which I should expect a response within 24 hours. I later found out that he filled out the ticket stating that the customer (me) was "uncooperative" (apparently because I refused to go through the set-up-an-email-account process, which would have done nothing more than waste the time of both of us). As might be imagined, I never did receive a telephone or email response to my complaints, although the news server did become accessible the next day, albeit with poor performance.
My eventual solution to the Flashcom news woes was to find a helpful ISP who would provide me with a "real" newsfeed of the dozen or so groups that I regularly read.
The next week mostly went rather smoothly and service was fine, until Saturday November 18, when there were at least three hours' worth of routing issues and major packet losses between my machine and the rest of the world. I called in the morning at about 11:00am and waited on hold for fifteen minutes, before having to hang up and leave for another event. After another 2-hour outage between noon and 2:00pm, I called again and talked to someone who claimed that they "knew about" the problem with a router in Atlanta, and that I should not expect it to be fixed until "sometime tonight or tomorrow." This sort of poor response, again, is horribly unacceptable for what is being sold as a "business-grade" service. Fortunately, things seemed to be back to normal by the early evening.
I had hoped that this would be the end of my Flashcom support woes, but, sadly, it was not. All morning on Monday, November 20, my router kept losing sync, consequently bringing the connection down and up and making it essentially useless. I called at about 1:00pm and was given trouble ticket #1-N27QH and told, again, that I should receive a response within 24 hours. Again, I did not receive any response. The technical support person, again, was totally clueless. He seemed to think that the problem might be in my network hub that existed between my computer and the router, despite the fact that I could ping and telnet to the router with no problem, and despite the fact that I could read about the loss of sync in the router's WAN event logs; essentially, the support person did not understand that one could login to the router and do any of this, and thus was unaware of an important troubleshooting procedure. The customer-service people gave a rather lame excuse for my inability to talk to a supervisor: "our database is down." Well, as a customer, it seems that this is Not My Problem. I didn't mean to be rude, but there really is no excuse for this sort of thing--if they are selling a "business-grade" service, then they should certainly have a large amount of redundancy built into their customer service procedures, even if it comes down to notes written with pencils and paper.
The "straw that broke the camel's back" came about midnight on November 21, when I received my first email invoice from Flashcom--in HTML! Perhaps I am a bit oversensitve, but I take great offense to HTML email, particularly when it comes from someone who should know better (such as an ISP). This just reeks of disrespect for the customer in my mind and is totally unacceptable behavior from an ISP which is providing a business-grade service. As a result, I forwarded this to the postmaster and abuse accounts at Flashcom (after all, HTML mail is abusive) and, as usual, received no response.
When I tried to call to complain about the HTML email and, worse, the lack of response to my trouble ticket about the repeated loss of sync (which had continued intermittently through Monday), I found out the hard way that the customer service hours, which had been 24/7 when I first signed up, had been reduced to 5am-6pm PST according to Flashcom's web site, but had actually been reduced to 8am-6pm PST according to the telephone recordings (one of many aspects of Flashcom's voicemail hell that tends to lead callers through a maze of menus only to end up at a busy signal).
This reduction in customer service, which basically meant that I had no matter of recourse until 11am EST if something broke, was totally unacceptable to me, considering that I was paying for "business" service. I was quite upset that they had seen fit to change the level of customer service that they provided after many customers (including myself) had already signed up to a one-year contract with rather serious penalties for early termination.
In any case, I left several voicemail messages for sales and customer service which, as usual, received no response.
At 11:00am, I called again and waited on hold for 20 minutes and finally spoke to someone who basically said that there was nothing that he could do and that there was no one else anywhere in the company to whom I could complain about the poor customer service that I had received. Further, their customer service database was still down and he could not do much of anything. I told him that this was unacceptable and that I would like to either cancel the service or receive a significant rate reduction due to the drastic reduction in customer service since I had signed up. He (predictably) said that he could not do anything about this and could not connect me to anyone who could, but suggested that I send email to someone named Randy Jones <rjones@flashcom.net> who would then respond within 24 hours (ha ha). I sent this nasty message to the suggested address, which turned out to be someone named Bob Jones who was a subscriber to the Flashcom service and not an employee. I re-sent it to <rjones@flashcom.com> who was apparently the employee. (I found it interesting that they get the .com/.net distinction wrong...customers of a commercial ISP should get .com addresses, while NOC employees and others involved with infrastructure should get .net addresses).
As usual, I received no telephone or email response to this message.
The next day, while I was away from my apartment to visit family for Thanksgiving, I called Flashcom's main number (long-distance) and told the operator that I needed to complain about poor customer service and to please not transfer me to the regular customer service line because it has excessively long hold times and no one there claims to be able to do anything. I was eventually transferred to the first truly helpful Flashcom employee with whom I have spoken (Belinda Hall, 949-608-6309). She said that I would be permitted to cancel the service without penalty, and she gave me her name and direct phone number. Therefore, I canceled the service and will be going back to text-based dialup shell access from a provider who actually provides good service.
Moral: DSL is "not there yet" as a consumer-grade or business-grade service, if my experience is any indication. I have heard many stories from other customers which are much worse than my own. At first, I was impressed with Flashcom because they seemed to be marketing the service to clueful users, without any condescending "you must be using Win9[5,8] or else you cannot use our service" verbiage on their web page and promotional materials. Instead, it turns out that they are just as clueless as everyone else, and their customer service is worse or at least not better.
If an ISP is going to provide business-grade service and charge extra for it, then they have an obligation to their customers to provide a level of customer service which is commensurate with their demands. Flashcom was trying to sell "business-grade" service with worse-than-consumer-grade reliability and support. I hear that AOL has better customer service than this, which is a really bad sign.
In the meantime, I'll stick with dialup shell access from Widomaker Communication and remote-access shell service from Panix. At least these two ISPs are clueful and provide good service...
NEW - November 25, 2000
On November 25, I received this message from Flashcom, apparently in response to my email message sent on November 21. I replied to it with this message and basically said what I have said above.
NEW - November 27, 2000
On November 27, I received yet another message from Flashcom, again in response to the same email message to which I had already received a response on 11/25. In true Flashcom form, it showed a complete lack of understanding of the contents of my complaint, as evidenced by the fact that it was sent in HTML (again!). Note that the sender also showed a complete lack of understanding of "netiquette" by not only sending the message in HTML but also by quoting the entirity of my original message in "upside-down" fashion. Argh!
Anyway, I sent this message in reply, which is basically the same thing I sent in reply to the 11/25 message.