I recently changed my ISP because they offered some decent bandwidth over the TV cable. This is a “business” contract with enhanced availability and support (which they charge for). But now I am confronted with the fact that they dropped my connection for about one day two times within a week. They claim that this is due to some required maintenance.
I know that there is no such thing as 100% availability, but what would you consider as acceptable and what isn’t?
Was that just a very bad week - a one off so far? Does the contract have an agreed minimum availability commitment?
I have had 20mins downtime at one time in 3years
But it’s all down to the detail of your contract. The small print
See the contract. In mine, the availability is guaranteed to be 99.8% (it’s a business contract), which is measured in 3 month blocks . In case they don’t deliver I get a full refund (i.e. also for my included phone connection) over the month(s) concerned.
I had under 1 hour of downtime until a couple of months ago over a period of 6 years of cable broadband. Then it took them over a month to find out there was a rupture in the cable and my modem was not functioning normally (no errors though). Now I’m having the full 120 Mb/sec down 10 Mb/sec up. Which is nice. And a 2 month refund is on the way. Which makes me feel they have some decency in them.
Does the contract have an agreed minimum availability commitment?
No. It is based on “best effort” whatever that means. A line with guaranteed uptime would be very expensive. But I think the performance they show now is below all standards. They announced some maintenance work by mail and claimed that a few (short) downtimes within a period of two weeks may be expected.
I have had 20mins downtime at one time in 3years
You are lucky. That’s about what I’m dreaming of.
Best I can get where I live though, is what is called adsl-max up to 8mb that’s 800kbps - much confusion in the UK about speed.
And not likely to get better either, I’m too remote. But lucky to have the telephone exchange a few hundred yards away, which means I get the full speed.
I did learn the hard way with ISP’s and had to play tough to get out of two contracts before this (now happy with ukfsn.org) a re-seller of entanet business broadband.
It is based on “best effort” whatever that means.
It’s a disclaimer that’s not even worth mentioning, except in an attempt to market a warm feeling. 
Not a business contract here, but on ADSL I haven’t had any serious downtime for several years apart from occasional dropouts which never last for more than a few minutes if that. On cable, it seems to go down for hours if it fails, as it did for a whole evening last month (no TV or BB), but no downtime for at least a year before that.
PS. I get 9-10Mbits/sec on each of ADSL and cable in UK, except cable speed falls more during peak times.
My ISP service sucks too! Long time back, too!
Be thankful, I went offline for 1-2 weeks when I dropped dial-up for just DSL. The hassle dealing with the help desk could have gotten me thrown in jail for murder had I the opportunity with one help desk dimwit. On top of it all I’m required to use their proprietary modem, despite the fact that my original modem worked 100% with the dial-up DSL before the switch.
I felt I had to increase my bandwidth 3.0gb to ensure I was getting an acceptable minimum d/l.
From time to time I get an outage of a couple of hours, always around 4am, that’s so far are resolved by cold booting my generic but less than 1yr old router.
My ISP is the only game in the district at a decent price, ie, for $10/mo more I could get SAT but SAT uses the same ISP for its upload service. Other major ISPs don’t have service in the area and smaller ISPs rent lines from the same ISP and cost more.
With the exception of a brief period last year (for which I was refunded) I always get top speeds, and for five or six years, there had been no down time until last month, when there were issues on the server for a couple of days. It’s not cheap in the US, but I have to admit I pay for excellent service. There are other providers that advertise higher speeds but are also known for throttling, and I would not do business with them.
I live in Canada and have Cable Internet. I have only had one problem. When we got rid of cable TV the technician crimped the cable to hard and left us without Internet 
They blamed us for the loss of Internet…it took them a week to fix it!!!
I get between 1-1.8Mbits/sec downloads…which is good for here 
Cheers!
etech97
But lucky to have the telephone exchange a few hundred yards away, which means I get the full speed.
I was too far away from the telephone exchange, that’s why I switched my ISP. Before the ADSL line was rock solid, but slow. It crawled at 78KBytes/sec max for download, upstream about half of this. Now I have 2.3 MBytes/sec downstream and 530 KBytes/sec upstream, but get those unpleasant interruptions.
To make matters worse some maillists report bounced messages when the main mail server is not reachable instead of using the secondary mail server. opensuse-buildservice@opensuse.org is one of them.
On 2010-10-29 11:06, vodoo wrote:
> I was too far away from the telephone exchange, that’s why I switched
> my ISP. Before the ADSL line was rock solid, but slow. It crawled at
> 78KBytes/sec max for download, upstream about half of this. Now I have
> 2.3 MBytes/sec downstream and 530 KBytes/sec upstream, but get those
> unpleasant interruptions.
If the current ISP is using the same copper line as the previous one (that’s what happens here
(Spain) when we switch providers), well, it is to be expected. Perhaps it is true that they are
doing repairs to the lines and you will get improvements later: long distance means they have to add
some type of adsl repeaters. And at such distance, they usually do not guarantee service.
> To make matters worse some maillists report bounced messages when the
> main mail server is not reachable instead of using the secondary mail
> server. opensuse-buildservice@opensuse.org is one of them.
Perhaps you should bring that matter on the main opensuse mail list, to find out if it supposed to
send instead to the backup server or not.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
If the current ISP is using the same copper line as the previous one (that’s what happens here (Spain) when we switch providers), well, it is to be expected.
No, the connection to my new ISP goes over the cable TV line. That’s the reason why it is much faster.
I think that’s par for the course with most ISPs. The people who do installation or come out to provide service often have no clue. We were having problems with our line a few years ago and we had at least three technicians come out before we got one that know what he was doing. Many of them blame the internal wiring or your router or some other thing for which they are not responsible (and which you don’t want them to touch!). In our case they eventually figured that the connection coming from the pole out on the street was flaky because it was corroded or damaged by squirrels or something. You’d think that would be the first think they’d check especially as I told them I’d plugged in at the box on the side of the house to determine that the problem was occurring before the wire entered the house. But the logic of that defeated the first couple of techs!
Obtaining any technical service via phone is worse but it can be entertaining. One time I was having trouble uploading photos for some reason. And the person on the other end told me that computer networks don’t support jpgs and that must be the problem! How bizarre is that? And once I was trying to setup a new cable modem and the phone support person didn’t understand what a MAC address was. This is a job for which no qualifications are required.
That’s a bit of a generalization. My experience with both the cable ISP (onsite) and ADSL (remote) provider here was good and they had a clue, and I had no technical problems. Although I wouldn’t say the same for the satellite dish ISP’s, from what I have seen of their subcontractor’s approach.
However the original cable installers, into the property, were subcontractors who weren’t well paid, and were given too short a time to cover each physical installation whether simple or more complicated. Mine was the latter, so they cut some corners which may lead to problems in the future for me and the ISP. That ISP now employs it’s own installers, so a neighbour recently enjoyed an even better installation. 
I have exactly one choice for “broadband” and that is a cable provider. My service is provided roadrunner but my cable company is BrightHouse networks. Phone support when the service goes down is via cellular phone as I have VOIP too. Outages usually happen in the middle of the night when I am using it. I don’t use roadrunner DNS because they are unreliable and their DNS servers just disappear at random times. Last time I called for phone support I talked to “Bob” somewhere in India. When the power goes out downtown I lose my internet. The Techs that have had to come out in the past for different reasons have all been pretty good. I have a windows laptop that I have to use when they come as they want a Windows box connected directly to the modem. My previous WRT54GL died once and caused grief so I can see their reasoning. Only having one choice for internet is bad. I couldn’t live with dial-up after 10 years of broadband. My internet up time isn’t as good as it had been up to two years ago.
I started on broadband with the original AT&T that installed a mini-sat receiver on the roof. No ground wires, probably the original WiFi, they sent an engineer with the installation crew. After a few tuning and internal rewiring (bad connectors from outside to inside) sessions over a month or so, everything worked extremely well. The service and support was perfect. After a year or so I was told AT&T was pulling the plug, a tech said the company was selling the technology to some South American company. So, I had to get DSL from my current ISP which has always been problematic with changes in services and installation snafus.
But except for the mysterioius 4am outages that require cold reboot of my router its tolerable. I use VOIP and cell for phone.
Yeah, I was maybe a bit harsh. I actually like my current ISP. I rarely have problems but when problems do occur getting them fixed can be a nightmare.
Problem is that here in the states there isn’t really any serious competition around. You have 1-2 DLS providers and cable. Prices are pretty high and service is not that great.
My dsl is what they call elite (6mb) for Los Angeles. I noticed that i have always drops. My Kopete notifies me then and thats why my netflix runs half great half dull.
I have AT&T btw and pay $35.