>I see now that we really are being taken to the cleaners by these >companies who claim no responsibility but to tell us what we can and >cannot do and change agreements at will.
First thing to underscore is that Centurytel should be used for internet connection only -- not for any other service. Their terms of service clearly demonstrate that they are not interested in providing these other services. There are many ways to get these other services from good providers so you should not put up with these turkeys. The good news is that once you are on the 'net you have access to a world full of choices. Some of them are very good choices and not expensive, sometimes even free. Strategically, you want all your other services provided by someone else so that you can drop this service at a moment's notice if they should displease you in any way. (If enough of their clients were to do this you would find that their quality of service would eventually improve.) Do their terms of service make any promises about the quality of service? How quickly do they promise to restore degraded connections? What kind of a refund can you expect for degraded service? Can you conduct your business given the quality of service they guarantee? I suppose that for a church being down for a few days may be acceptable. If that would not be acceptable you may want to consider downgrading to an inexpensive service level from Centurytel and getting the same low-level service from the other provider. Then get a router with 2 WAN ports. Connect each port to each provider's router. If one goes down you will still be connected via the other provider. The router will balance your traffic across the 2 WAN ports if they are both working and automatically switch to one port is one is down. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
