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Internet "Service" Providers Who Suck

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Disclaimer: These are my own anecdotes and do not represent a statistically significant sample of user experiences. However, one of the great things with the Internet is its ability to let people to share individual experiences. All of the stuff below happened to one person: me.

Surfing the 'net is less enjoyable than it could be because the people who bring the Internet to you (Internet Service Providers or "ISPs") suck. In addition to being unable to run a reliable network, many of them lie, cheat, and steal. They pay mean and stupid people to answer the help center phones and be unhelpful and lavish tons of money to meaner and stupider people to run the company. They hire plain old stupid people to write the software and more of them to run the operations (or more accurately, not run the operations).

Using our revolutionary and ultra-complex SpeedSuck^TM neural net technology running on a really big and power hungry UNIX® supercomputer, you can select one of the following ISPs Who Suck and be whisked away almost instantaneously (whoa!) to the horrible anecdote related to the company.

FirstWorld Communications - September 1998 to November 1999 (defunct as an ISP)
Excite@Home via AT&T Broadband - November 1999 to September 2000 defunct
Freewwweb - March 2000 to August 2000 defunct
freeDEM.com - July 2000 to August 2000 defunct
FreeAV via 1stup.com - August 2000 to December 2000 defunct
NetZero - August 2000 to September 2001 (merged with Juno to form United Online)
BlueLight.com via Spinway.com - August 2000 to August 2001 (free service defunct; Chapter 11 bankruptcy)
Say, aren't you forgetting someone? - forever and ever
Telocity via NorthPoint/DirecTV DSL - November 2000 to May 2001 defunct
Juno Online - July 2001 to September 2001 (merged with NetZero to form United Online)
United Online (NetZero & Juno merger) - August 2000 to March 2002
AT&T WorldNet - July 2001 to December 2001 (i495 service defunct)

This is not a comprehensive list of ISPs who suck. There are plenty more of them out there. You can rehash your own snafus at the ISPs Who Suck forum. (Note that the ISPs above are presented in chronological order of use, and not by any sort of performance rating.)

What are my alternatives?

Sprint - this big phone company offers some fixed-wireless broadband access defunct
EarthLink - the nation's third largest ISP (by paying subscribers) has dial-up and DSL access
America Online and MSN - yeah, right, on a cold day in hell

But not these losers

Metricom Inc. - owners of the Ricochet wireless network defunct
Rhythms NetConnections - the dead DSL network defunct
Covad Communications - the ailing DSL network
DSL.net - another doomed DSL ISP
Sprint ION - a telco's money-losing broadband experiment defunct
AT&T Wireless (fixed) - another last-mile wireless service is gone defunct

My current ISP

SBC - Ugh, the phone company: October 2002 to present my current ISP
BDCSI - Still the best: December 2001 to October 2002
A free 802.11b network - a freebie in downtown Mountain Dew, California I started using in March 2002

You can skip to the post mortem, learn about ways you can contribute, see some helpful resources, or read the bitter epilogue.

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