Bay Area home internet

Thu Aug 17 17:03:38 PDT 2006

Quoting Alan Horn (ahorn at deorth.org):

> Not really pertinent to home use, but I have found when using resellers in 
> a business environment, each reseller adds their own support SLA on top. 
> So, for example reseller A may have a time to respond of four hours, at 
> which point they determine that its an SBC failure. SBC then have a four 
> hour response SLA.
> 
> So you end up waiting eight hours before you even have an engineer looking 
> at the fault. Small businesses beware.

1.  I was specifically talking about CLECs[1], _as opposed to_ resellers.
None of the DSL-issuing CLECs I spoke of (Sonic.net, Speakeasy, Raw
Bandwidth Communications) is merely a reseller.  In fact, please note
my having pointed out to Bill Ward the crucial areas in which they 
bypass the telco (ILEC) and most of its screwups, sharing only the local
loop and ATM cloud.

2.  To stress again briefly, quality of DSL CLEC management makes all
the difference.  E.g., Raw Bandwidth's Mike Durkin detects and acts on
SBC/$WHOEVER screwups immediately, knows exactly whose gonads to
squeeze, and has them on speed dial.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier