smoke signals

[cellio]

DSL partially came back tonight (so over 3 days of outage). I can get to my shell account and read mail, but non-cached web pages (like, say, anything on LJ) are timing out. (Name service works; HTTP service then times out. Dunno what that means given that outbound ssh/telnet works.) Dani can get to his Telerama shell account but can't use it to read his email, which resides on a different Telerama server.

Friday we ordered DSL service from Nidhog, a small provider I'd never heard of before Thursday but that said they could get us up quickly. The swtich-over is blocked at Verizon now; the folks at Nidhog thought we might get connected today, but I guess not. (I am tentatively holding a Wednesday appointment with Comcast, but I hope to cancel that.) The person I talked with at Nidhog seemed clueful and eager to please; I imagine that they can pick up a significant-to-them pile of new business if they do this right. I'm all for that. :-)

Several of my coworkers use(d) Telerama and we have a wiki, so naturally there's been some information-sharing. The discussion there led me to discover that Telerama has dropped its price for our service level, yet they never told us or reduced our price. Which, you know, might not be unreasonable (caveat emptor) if they ever actually delivered the promised connection speeds... Well, with luck we'll be done with them soon. The cause of the outage, according to the press, is a $30,000 bill with their provider that they cannot pay. I didn't expect service to come back at all.

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

Ralph might remember for certain but I'm pretty sure that Nidhog is run by the guys who own the building where Queria was located.

[cellio]

That's what Steven told me on Friday, yes.

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

(bad html. reposting.)

The story in Friday's Post-Gazette (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07082/771925-28.stm) had this nifty little twist:

In a twist, Verizon, Telerama's competitor that offers broadband Internet service for as little as $14.99, compared with Telerama's $45, could end up being its savior.

Mr. Luce, who moved the bulk of his business to Seattle in 2004, said Pittsburgh-area customers should be back online by this morning at the latest because of a deal to re-route Telerama's Web services over Verizon's phone network.

I'm guessing that anyone who stays with Telerama (i.e. doesn't explicitly call and cancel) becomes a Verizon customer next month. For the big V, $30k is a fair acquisition cost for the entire customer base of a competitor.

[cellio]

That sounds plausible. It sounds like a good deal for Verizon. (If they had FiOS to my house we probably would have switched to that, but until they do we can get our DSL elsewhere.)

This morning the situation was the same as last night: telnet/ssh works, web doesn't. Oh, and no answer (recording or otherwise) at tech support, natch. (Their status page says things that aren't true for us.)