Problems with Flashcom, a national DSL service provider
From: Ed Anderson
Subject: Re: FlashCom versus PBI for Pac Bell DSL?
Date: 11 Apr 1999 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID:
References:
X-Complaints-To: abuse@@-DESPAM-@@swbell.net
X-Trace: typhoon01.swbell.net 923789415 216.101.109.87 (Sat, 10 Apr 1999 17:10:15 PDT)
Organization: large. http://www.pinch.com
User-Agent: tin/pre-1.4-980818 ("Laura") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/3.1-RELEASE (i386))
NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 17:10:15 PDT
Newsgroups: ba.internet
poldy wrote:
> Any opinions or experiences with FlashCom? How do they compare with PBI
> in terms of performance, service and features? For instance, there seems
> to be questions about PBI's news feeds in this newsgroup.
I had to leaave Flashcom because of some serious problems with overbilling
and their breach of contract. They said they needed cut the speed in half.
The account was closed at the beginning of the year, and I'm still
cleaning up the various billing snafus.
See http://www.pinch.com/flashcom/ for the gory details.
I switched over to PBI in SF because it seemed the quickest way to get my
phone bill back under my own name. That week, PBI also announced their
ADSL price drop and speed boost, which clinched it. Unfortunately, while
PacBell's ADSL connection works just fine at 1.5Mb, the congestion at
PBI's redback router causes lost packets and delays. I've been charting
the details for over a month. PBI has acknowledged the problem, but hasn't
set it as a priority for repair. If you need quick response and good
connectivity to the backbone, PBI is not the way to go. Telnet connections
will be frustrating at times, and multimedia streams will suffer "net
congestion." I don't play online games, but when the ping times get over a
half second, I hear gamers get trounced by your opponents.
Since PBI will not add my domain name to their DNS server, I'm using a web
redirector. I hope PacBell has a sense of humor about the page title:
http://welcome.to/pachell
There are some useful tools there for pinpointing connectivity and NNTP
problems, along with current status on bandwidth.
-- Ed "can't recommend either one" Anderson
Displayed using a script by Ed Anderson
Problems with Flashcom, a national DSL service provider