[Discuss] business class ISP recommendations

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Tom Metro wrote:
> I'd like to hear from those on the list who specially have had
> experience with the business class service from these companies.

Thanks to all who replied on this thread. Not many responses, but I
wasn't expecting to see very many. The business offerings from these
cable companies still don't seem to be all that popular with SOHO users.
I suspect customers just don't see enough added value to justify the
premium over residential service. (And most people don't care about
things like static IPs and PTR records.)

I'd be curious to know who the top 5 last-mile ISPs are in this region
for businesses with 50 or fewer employees. (Anyone know a resource with
that sort of data?)

To summarize, here are the votes:

Jerry gave a mild recommendation for RCN, noting that "first level
support people were not very knowledgeable."

Ed gave a strong negative recommendation against Comcast, saying that he
saw evidence they were blocking inbound port 22, even though no ports
should be blocked (per their own policy) on business class service.

Daniel Hagerty says he is "mostly happy" with Comcast, that support has
been decent, but that he has inconclusively seen some evidence of "port
22 blocking."

Bill Horne and Martin Owens chimed in with some semi-off topic
discussion more applicable to these companies' residential offerings.


Apparently no one has experience with Verizon's business class FIOS,
which, reluctantly, is my first choice.

Comcast's port blocking behavior may vary depending on the head-end
involved. That has supposedly been the case on the residential side.
Although I have no intentions of opening up port 22 (which is just
asking for nuisance attacks), I still consider it a show stopper for a
business class provider to be blocking any ports.



Daniel Hagerty wrote:
> They do support setting PTRs on the addresses they hand out.  At the
> time, it was a bit painful to setup...

It can't be much worse that my DSL provider who required multiple
requests over the span of multiple years before they set up a PTR
record, and when they finally did, they didn't bother to tell me. (I
just noticed it in my logs one day, far removed from the time I last
requested it.)


Martin Owens wrote:
> Maybe one day the USA will follow the UK model for telco and do LLU[1].

Yes, going back to the model of fairly leased local loops, as existed
with the copper wiring, seems like a necessary minimum antidote to the
lack of competition, and highly unlikely to happen, given how the FCC
has been captured by the industry it regulates. (Please fork a new
thread of you want to discuss this further.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
The Perl Shop, Newton, MA, USA
"Predictable On-demand Perl Consulting."
http://www.theperlshop.com/