Quarts and Pints

Prior to our recent move we were with the same provider for three years and were also lucky enough to get unlimited access for a very reasonable price. No delays dialing-in, no bumping off when idle and as fast a connection speed as our tel. lines would permit.

Company "I" was a pleasure to deal with but was purchased by company "A" which in turn was gobbled up by company "P." Along the way service slowed down, the downtime started creeping up and towards the end logging on was becoming a pain.

Choosing as we did... and still do, to live in relatively remote rural areas limits the number of options available to us. I hear tell that cable TV is available in Canada and high speed cable modems are increasingly there to be added but not at any address of ours... then or now.

The situation is also improving with old fashioned telephone lines... technologies like ISDN and DSL are around but only if you live next door to the exchange.

Needless to say we've had to shop around for a new provider and it didn't take long to discover we had a choice of one but that didn't stop me doing some research before signing up. No unlimited plans are offered but we settled for the closest we could get to our requirements... off peak hours are free, and we're night birds anyway.

All the right things were said as to the ratio of equipment to accounts and the access speed of the line is fine but it didn't take long to detect that a lot of server overloading is going on. We're no better off than we were before and it's really depressing.

I know enough to be satisfied it's not our setup... the network and our account sharing software is blindingly fast, and I've got plenty of utilities telling me where the bottleneck is.

At least this location is temporary and we'll be moving again soon. Maybe we can still find our seclusion but with 21st. century amenities.

Whatever happened to good old fashioned service... and delivering on promises?

The distance we moved (1300 miles) and travelling by road during the winter with a trailer in tow caused us to be off line for a while and we though it best to maintain our old E-mail account for a time... at least it would still be delivered.

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