[buug] Re: IMP, horde & ISP [Was: Re: IMP [Was: DHCP: override ...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> It's provided by my ISP.  I've got an ISP:
> http://www.rawbandwidth.com/
> that's substantially more competent and clueful (and also UNIX/LINUX/BSD/...
> friendly) than most.  Costs a bit more, ... but also has *very* reasonable
> terms of service [...]

Same here -- static-IP, home ADSL from Mike Durkin's Raw Bandwidth
Communications.  

One of the many winning aspects of that company is that, any time SBC /
PacBell / AT&T / whatever-name-du-jour's underlying frame transport
shoots Mike's IP service in the foot, if only briefly (and this happens
only very rarely), he's right on their case, tenaciously.  If you're
among the subscribers who called in to report such an outage, he keeps
you briefed, and then sends out an explanatory report when things get
fixed, and I swear to God he sounds _contrite_ about it.  And upset at
SBC for inconveniencing _his_ customers!  I keep feeling I should send
over some nice home-made baked goods with a note saying "Mike, relax!
You're doing a phenomenal job."

The amount of downtime is not even worth mentioning, over the many years
I've been with Mike's firm -- and he even went out of his way to advise
me on how to save money, when I moved service to our newer house, last
year.

I don't use any of the firm's services other than basic IP transport and
occasionally one of the two large-provider Usenet services (Supernews
and one other), but that's more than enough to earn high marks from me.