Re: SEUL: ezppp sucks rocks

[William Merriam <william@apisdn.com>]

At 09:20 AM 2/8/98 -0800, Mark Stone wrote:

>First of all, few people are going to need to make a ppp connection to
>more than one provider. I've had a ppp account for years, and never had
>occaision to make use of another.

I'm considering using two isps just for the sake of availability.  I
suppose other Europeans do, when availability is important.

I use Netcom UK, who are supposed to be, um, "quite good" - by UK standards
at least.  The service costs about $28 per month and is supposed to come
with 24 hour support.  At about 1:00 this morning, it went unavailable.
Since I am planning on relying heavily on dial-up access, I decided to
pretend it was important and see if I could get the problem fixed out of
business hours.  By 3:30am, I had spent about 40 minutes talking to the
technical support man, who lives in California and has difficulty dialling
to the UK, never mind fixing connection problems.  It's the same man every
time I call during that time in the morning.  He suggested all sorts of
silly things, none of which made any difference.  He decided my modem was
at fault.

I  found the real cause and phoned again to have it fixed.  I hung up after
waiting on hold for just over an hour.  It still wasn't working at 9:00
when I called daytime technical support.  They had to set up a temporary
account for me.

Excuse me if I'm rambling.  The point I'm trying to make is that net
conditions vary, and so do people's requirements.