Internet Service - repairs / service / reliability

[Mark Sobell]

I will second the praise for Raw Bandwidth; I have been using them for
10+ years. Mike Durkin runs it and is extremely knowledgeable and
dedicated. At one point he saved me a bunch of money from switching me
over from a phone line and DSL to dedicated copper wires (ADSL2+).
Spent several hours at my house optimizing the connection, calculating
various distances to the CO, and generally making sure I had the
fastest connection possible for my grade of service. He seems to work
24x7. If you leave a message he is back to you very quickly. Can't
give Mike and Raw Bandwidth high enough praise.

            Mark


On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 3:37 PM, Michael Paoli
<Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Individual results/experience can and will vary with service and
> reliability - even with the same ISP.
>
> In my personal experience, I've found:
>
> Raw Bandwidth - absolutely friggin' rocks.  Costs a bit more, but darn
> worth it.  Also, no clue as to how they are on supporting folks that
> aren't so familiar with what they're doing or attempting to do with
> DSL, IP, operating system networking configuration, etc.  But if you
> know what the heck you're doing, well, ... Raw Bandwidth certainly well
> knows what they're doing, and how to do it well.
>
> AT&T - meh, varies.  Cheap (as in $$), reliability so-so, service
> quality can and does vary quite a bit (most of the time at least
> adequate/satisfactory, but by no means does it always measure up even
> to that mediocre of level).
>
> Others I don't have direct personal experience with, though I've
> generally quite heard for good Linux-friendly, Raw Bandwidth and Sonic
> are generally one's best bets locally (not necessarily in that order).
> And if one wants cheap DSL, AT&T can be made to work with Linux, but
> for all intents and purposes they don't and won't support it - but that
> doesn't mean one can't set it up and use it anyway ... with some
> moderate hoops to jump through and minor "tricks" and the like (set it
> up for someone in SF not too many years ago - with just Linux ... and
> mostly some User-Agent manipulation to fib to AT&T about operating
> system to make it through their websites - and minor reverse
> engineering their "this is how you set it up for <such-and-such
> non-Linux operating system>" into the needed generic technical bits of
> configuration to be done on the customer side of the DSL line).
>
>> From: "Daniel Gimpelevich" <daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us>
>> Subject: Re: Internet Service - Repairs
>> Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 11:10:13 -0800
>
>
>> On Tue, 2015-01-20 at 16:15 -0800, Tom Tt wrote:
>>>
>>> Do the other Internet Service Providers do the same?  Probably so.
>>
>>
>> Sonic does. DSLExtreme was unable to when I was a customer.
>
>