ISPs who suck, ISP Hall of Shame, NetZero, BlueLight.com, Spinway.com, freeDEM.com, PacBell, SBC, Telocity, NorthPoint DSL, Juno, United Online, Metricom, Ricochet, Rhythms DSL, Covad, EarthLink, DSL.net, AT&T Wireless

Post mortem

ISPs who suck, ISP Hall of Shame, Excite@Home, AT&T Broadband, NetZero, FreeAV, 1stup.com, BlueLight.com, Spinway.com, freeDEM.com, Freewwweb, Sirius, FirstWorld, Verado, PacBell, SBC, Telocity, NorthPoint DSL, Juno, United Online, Metricom, Ricochet, Rhythms DSL, Covad, EarthLink, DSL.net, AT&T Wireless

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My current ISP

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Introduction

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The cable company sucks.

The phone company sucks.

Excite@Home is still the worst ISP I have ever used to this day. If you find an ISP who sucks, get the hell outta there and short their stock. Don't stick around. The service outages, bad customer service, time wasted trying to deal with it, etc. simply aren't worth it.

Juno is by far the worst free ISP I have ever used to this day; there is no logic to the way they close off access. Even if you want very light Internet access, Juno is amongst the very worst ISPs on this planet.

Service providers are judged not only by how good the service is when it works normally, but also how they respond when it is broken. All of the "service providers" failed miserably with the latter. It might be easy to say "Well, you get what you pay for with free ISPs," if your service offering sucks, you're not really get a bargain if you get free pain rather than pay pain.

November 2001 - Broadband is very, very ill

The RBOCs have essentially won. Their sleazoid anti-competitive business practices combined with inept operations by their now mostly defunct competitors have reduced the broadband market into an absolute wasteland.

As a consumer, you are stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: the Baby Bell and your local cable company, both of whom provide technologically archaic, over-priced products and services combined with some of the most atrocious customer support a consumer will ever endure.

It will be years before consumers see an interesting array of services offered in a healthy, competitive, customer-focused atmosphere.

Contribute

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Visit the ISPs Who Suck forum

While venting doesn't solve your immediate problems with your ISP, at least it feels good. So kick off your shoes, sit down with a pint of Ben & Jerry's or a glass of wine, and sharpen your tongue.

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Helpful Resources

DSL Reports - well, since there's less DSL selection out there than there was a couple of years ago, much of the information on the site is obsolete (e.g., Flashcom.com complaints); I remember coming to this site, typing in my area code, and getting maybe six or seven DSL providers. Today, there are only two (the hated RBOC and EarthLink). It's still a good place to do some research and they have this cool tool to measure your actual network bandwidth.
2Wire - While they're trying to hawk their own little line-sharing products for DSL and cable modem users, there's a bit of information here including an ISP search and a bandwidth meter.
F---edCompany.com - Want to know if your ISP is in dire straits and ready to go belly up? Have no fear, Pud keeps track of this stuff for you! His loyal patrons also contribute plenty of anecdotes to his bulletin boards. I suppose you could read similar stuff on Slashdot, but Pud's funnier. (The FC forum participants are raunchier than Slashdotters, too.)

Fry's Sucks - Don't find your ISP's suckiness enough? Go buy some stuff for your PC at a bricks-and-mortar store that sucks.

previous
My current ISP

top
Introduction

next
Epilogue