Pity me. I’ve been stuck on dial-up since the ’90s. I used to use Earthlink as my internet service provider (ISP) and was satisfied with the service, but I switched to lesser known Higstream several years ago to save money. All I wanted was a connection to the internet and Highstream did just as good a job as Earthlink for less than half the price. I recommended Highstream to many others, including my mother who also switched to Highstream.
On May 30th my mother received an email stating that Highstream will be ceasing operations in just a few weeks and that all customers will be transferred over to PeoplePC. I never received any such email and the Highstream website made no mention that they were going out of business so my initial thoughts were that this was a phishing scam. But I decided to actually call up Highstream and ask them what was going on. After 40 minutes on hold I reached an operator who told me that it is all true. The fact that I was about to lose my ISP sucked enough but I had to question why I was not notified of the impending service termination. I figured that they would chalk it up to a mistake or spam filters, but they freely admitted that Highstream was not notifying all of their customers at once. They decided to stagger their notification emails in groups over multiple weeks in order to avoid being overwhelmed by a mass of support requests. It’s now June 6th, seven days after my mother received her email and only three business days before I need to cancel my service to avoid being transferred to PeoplePC – and they still haven’t sent me any notice! Other customers who were sent emails last month are given weeks worth of notice to make alternate arrangements but I now have to scramble to find a new ISP and cancel my old service quickly. And I’m actually lucky because I wouldn’t have known at all if my mother hadn’t told me. I was totally satisfied with Highstream’s dial-up ISP service for years but this transition process is BS.
So what am I going to do now? I’m not sure yet, but there’s no way I’m going to PeoplePC. PeoplePC requires you to use their “smart dialer” which interferes with various desktop applications which sometimes need to open a connection to the internet. And even though you do pay them for service, they still require you keep their special advertising-filled homepage open in the background while surfing, choking up what little bandwidth you can actually squeeze through a phone line. In the 1990′s I was happy with Earthlink, but who the heck would actually pay $21.95/mo. when you can get DSL Lite for about the same cost? So I’ve started looking for new dial-up ISP’s. Since some people in similar situations may find this post, I’ll share what I found.
My requirements:
- Cheap (or else I may as well get DSL Lite)
- No forced advertisements
- No requirements to use special dialing software
- No requirement to keep their website open in the background
- Reasonable idle time limitations
Given my requirements, all of the big name companies were immediately crossed off the list. I found plenty of small ISP’s that fit the bill so I began to judge them by their website (perhaps unfairly, but if they don’t know how to create a professional website than what makes me think they know how to run an ISP). I was also weary of ISP’s that charged too little because they’re more likely to go out of business quickly. I narrowed my finds down to just two, ISP.com and SurfBest, neither of which I had ever heard of before. I decided to go with ISP.com because it appeared more professional (judging a book by it’s cover), has been in business since 1993, and they were cheaper. I just had one question/concern about their disconnect policy after only 15 minutes of idle time, [see bottom for update] so I wrote an email to both their support and billing teams. That was 48 hours ago and I haven’t gotten any response from ISP.com. A second email has also been ignored. So I decided to write an email to SurfBest to ask about their idle time disconnect, and to test their tech support. I was amazed that even though my email was sent late at night, I received a personal response to my questions in just 11 minutes! That’s impressive. Plus they won’t automatically disconnect you until you’re idle for 8 hours.
I still have until the end of the week to look in to other options like DSL Lite but if I do go with dial-up again, SurfBest definitely won my vote with excellent customer service and a generous idle disconnect time. Conversely, ISP.com lost my vote with non-existent customer support. I hope my mini-review of cheap, no-frill ISP’s helps somebody out there.
Update 1 on 6/7/07:
ISP.com finally responded to my support questions, three days after the original email and 44 hours after the 2nd email which is the one they actually responded to. Still bad support. According to their response, ISP.com’s idle disconnect time is actually an acceptable 5 hours, despite the fact that their own website says 15 minutes.
