[oclug] Rogers sucks

[Brad Barnett]

On Fri, 8 Mar 2002 21:32:03 -0500
burns <burns at burnsmacdonald.com> wrote:

> On March  8, 2002 09:19 pm, Francis J. A. Pinteric wrote:
> 
> >
> > As for those people who are agitating to leave Rogers for iStop, I
> > suggest that if you do so, try to go and negociate a block deal with
> > them. Why go to iStop simply because you're fed up with Rogers? Stick
> > with Rogers and join in an inter-LUG initiative to get them support
> > us. That way you can leverage that against iStop (or any other ISP for
> > that matter) and try to get the best deal for OCLUG with a mass
> > sign-up.
> >
> > We have clout, so we might as well use it.
> 
> We've already done that. OCLUGGERS get a discount from iStop on the
> initial price or setup charges (I forget the details).

Neither is the case.  That was just a temporary deal because of the
problems Rogers was having ... to quote Ralph:

"As for the OCLUG deal, that was for Dec/Jan only."

So the deal is over.  Furthermore, I have been rather... displeased with
ISTOP's initial uptime.  Things seem to have improved so far, but I was
quite unhappy with their attitude about it.  When I expressed my
displeasure with the stability of the connection, I was told :

"Unfortunatly there are no SLA's (Service Level Aggreements) offered on
Residential connection so there is no gaurenteed uptime, although we aim
for 99%/mth"

Now, _aiming_ for 99% uptime per month is pathetic.  The obvious aim is
for 100% uptime, but apparently ISTOP isn't that concerned with trying to
reach such a goal.  Let's be perfectly blunt here.. 1% downtime is
approximately 7.2 hours of disconnectivity a month.  When I responded to
this point I was completely ignored, even though the rest of my email was
an attempt to assist with debugging the problem.

Understand something here.  I had had 4 periods of downtime in excess of
one hour each, in less than 2 weeks, and when I complained ISTOP quoted
some blather about 99% uptime, and ignored me when I mention that 7.2
hours downtime was below even the standards one expects from freaking dial
up!   

Again, for the record, things have improved since then, although periods
of downtime do still exist.  Since I have only been an ISTOP customer for
3 or 4 weeks, obviously this isn't a fair enough period of study to ensure
an accurate picture of their practises and stability.

Two things are clear so far though.  If you are unhappy with their service
and complain about it they ignore you, and they aim for 99% uptime. 
Everyone should keep this in mind.   

> 
> Let's not forget that iStop is almost entirely run on Linux and that
> they officially support Linux clients.
>