On Monday 20 Sep 2004 12:14 pm, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: > At 2004-09-20 12:03:53 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I am using the absolutely pathetic Hotwire Internet services. > > Please do tell me more about Hotwire. > > Their network actually looked non-pathetic when I was looking for an ISP > some months ago. But despite a half-dozen phone calls and several email > exchanges, nobody from their sales team ever returned my calls. And my > nasty (snail-mail) letter to their director was apparently ignored.
The problem with Hotwire is that they have "outsourced" local connectivity to outfits not very dissimilar to your local cable TV wallah. So: 1. You dont get any support between 7pm and 11 am when these outfits shop is closed. So if your line went down in the evening, it will get fixed earliest n the next afternoon. 2. When your line gets down, the utterly incompetent personnel of these outfits take hours to find the fault. In one case, they insisted that I first reboot my computer in front of them so that they are sure the problem is not in my computer. Only then they will look for fault elsewhere. 3. Often when I call up to complain, they ping me from their local line and if it pings, they insist that everything is ok. It takes quite a while to convince them that their uplink to ISPs is bad. 4. After years, it finally seems that they got a decent bandwidth managemtn solution (packetshaper). However, for some reason, a number of websites round the world dont seem to be completely accessible because of some screwup with their transparent web caching. I spend most of the net time, tunneling my web traffic through SSH. 5. Outgoing ICMP, NTP is blocked. Why on earth would NTP need to be blocked, escapes me. Seems hotwire has no clue that round the world people have implemented firewall rules to stop work specific ICMP traffic. 6. Their latest login mechanism is web based, so you have to login using your browser to start working. You are logged off inexplicably and at odd times of the day. I have woken up a number of days finding the night download that I had started got terminated, and required me to login to continue. I could go on and on. - Sandip -- Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home: http://www.sandipb.net PGP/GPG Signature: 51A4 6C57 4BC6 8C82 6A65 AE78 B1A1 2280 A129 0FF3 multicasts on broken packets _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
