Even More Fun With Charter
November 16, 2006

It is now my goal to document every extensive downtime that Charter has wrought upon my poor little soul. Yesterday around 03:00, my box at home got knocked off the net. "Oh noes!", says I, "What have I done to bring this upon myself?". When I get home around 05:00 - I find that indeed, there are no internets coming from my tubes! I've got Charter in my phone contact list now (Yes, it's that bad) - and dialed them right up.

After sitting through a hold queue, I get dumped to an automated "help system" that tells me to power-cycle and all that good stuff ("What is the nature of your problem?", "No cable signal.", "I'm sorry? What? If you're having internet problems, please say; 'Internet Problems'"). I waited on hold for a robot, cool. I mash the zero key repeatedly and it transfers me to a real hold queue. I wait awhile and then get Audrey from Rochester. It takes thirty minutes to run through her script before she finally runs the damned modem diagnosis and - HOLY SHIT, my modem aint on their network. You'd think that it cost them 50$ each time.

After that, she tells me the next available appointment is a week from that day. "Thank you for choosing Charter." - I wish I had a choice.

I hang up with her and call back completely dis-satisfied and perfectly happy to schedule another visit just to annoy them. It's their techs who did something wrong anyways, it always is. I think that they hire out of the High School Football Team(tm). I go through the scripts, play all the right lines... then my cable LED blinks on. What? Here it comes again! This time, it stays on. I'm on the phone with the Op and tell her to cancel my prior request.

I hang up, go downstairs to the equipment room... sure enough there's two bumbling Charter techs. They had techs on site, and were perfectly willing to schedule an appointment for a week from today. Cool. Thanks St. Cloud City Counsel; Monopolies rock!

Citescape
October 28, 2006

I wanted to give a big shout-out to Citescape. We've been using them at $WeMakeLegalResearchSoftware (did you know that I actually get hits off of that?) for four or five months now - and I wanted to talk about how great they are. Now, Jesse (the GM over there) is a regular commenter on my blog - but that doesn't affect me. You all know that I'm more than happy to rant against a corporation / company if they've wronged me (or my company!).

What's so great about them though? There's so much to love.

Number one is that they've got competent caring people staffing their services. Got a problem with their service? A knowledgeable /team/ of techs (well, you know... two) will be sent out to service your request and investigate. What's that mean? someone who understands that you've already ran traceroute and found that things aren't the fault of your own routing system. They won't respond with "If you're not running Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP SP 2 - we won't help you. Reboot your machine, reset the router and don't call us again until tomorrow".

Number two, ISP service. The uptime that we've experienced (since settling with the setup woes, which were quite large - partly to blame for someone severing our wire and partly to blame for an improper estimate of distance on the part of citescape (fixed of course)); but it took some time)... anyway, the uptime is great. Last weekend we experienced our first downtime in months. Hear that Charter customers, months. Nice, eh?

Number three, customer service. When there's a problem, they take care of it. Not only do they send techs (and I mean techs - not some kid fresh out of high-school who thinks that networking consists of plugging cat-5 into a switch) out to fix the problem immediately (within a day) - but if it's a bad problem that's confirmed to be at their fault; they fess up to it and provide a credit. Something that makes the customer feel happy; if the service hasn't been delivered - it's not charged. So simple, yet so often overlooked.

Number four ... and this is one of my personal favorites... no filtering. uPNP is filtered now, due to some recent packet-storm issues... but nothing else. Do you want to host that low-volume HTTP server? Go. Do you want to use BitTorrent and download the latest Linux distribution? Go. They are an Internet Service Provider. Charter is an HTTP servce provider - if you deviate from just downloading porn and the latest G.W. Bush announcements - you'll run into trouble. Not with Citescape. You're free to explore the /rest/ of the internet. You know, the part that your Mom doesn't know about. Things like IRC, FTP, BitTorrent... things that your avg. Joe Footballporn doesn't even know exist. Citescape lets you get to them.

Ok. Enough. If you live in the St. Cloud area, definitely check out Citescape for an ISP. You'll be very glad that you did. I'm proud to say that St. Cloud finally has a real ISP. We're no longer the rural community that we used to be (thanks St. Cloud City Counsel for allowing to be instituted a monopoly on wired internet)!

Working With CitEscape
June 30, 2006

As some of you may have noticed while following my blog; we switched over to CitEscape recently at my office. I wanted to detail how it went, and how wonderfully citescape's been treating us.

After talking with Jesse Sams (their GM) on my blog and through e-mails for awhile (and having seen how terrible Charter had gotten) I decided to give Citescape a go at our offices here at $WeMakeLegalResearchSoftware. I figured, what the heck. Jesse was willing to allow us to sign up, get everything setup, and back out if the service wasn't what we were expecting. Only a little time lost on my part if things don't work out, right?

After talking with Jesse and getting everything setup, Jesse let us know upfront that they were experiencing bandwidth issues and were already at their maximum for their subscriber base. He told us to wait a little bit, and he'd get us hooked up as soon as their new line was put in - so that they would be able to service us properly. Wow, a company who cares about providing the service they describe to their customers.

Fast forward a few weeks. The installation and testing took a little longer than Jesse had expected/told us, and we were getting antsy. I finally got the message from Jesse that installation was going to go ahead. Great! This was right after Charter murdered one of their main routers again.

Sometime that morning their technician's showed up and started mucking about on the roof. Our office is in a condominium style situation, so there's a management station onsite and we are not the only tenants. Loe, but did the secretary at the management station cry out; "Get down from that yonder roof!". Long story short, they had to scramble and regroup while someone else in our building (who was also signing up for service with Citescape) argued with the management. Luckily, the other individual managed to convince them to allow the installation (as nothing was getting mounted directly to the roof).

So, Citescape returns the next day and begins installation again. Avast! More problems! The subscriber module they had purchased was malfunctioning, and they were again forced to disappear to order a new one.

A few days later, they returned. This time the SM worked! Wonderful! Citescape's technicians mounted the hardware, and ran all the cabling (through the dropped ceilings) into our office and plunked it down right by our router.

Thankfully, the technician hooked the cable up to his laptop (An Apple!) and plugged away, making sure it work. We then got the cabling hooked into our firewall, and everything worked perfectly. Great!

All was not well though. After Citescape's technicians had gone home we noticed dropped connections occuring with alarming frequency. I ran traceroute's and determined that the dropped connections were directly related to their own gateway, and dropped Jesse a line about it.

Jesse responded promptly, and within the next day he had dispatched his technicians to look into the problem. The technicians arrived, and they instantly began checking out their equipment. Note, they began checking out their equipment. This is where Citescape began to diverge completely from other companies. The first thing they did was look at their equipment, not tell us to "reboot our computer and call them in the morning". Nice!

So, they determine that the antenna was improperly (physically) configured and went onto the roof to swap stuff around - and hoped that they had fixed the problem.

Sadly, the next day connections started dropping again. I was getting miffed, my users were getting miffed, and stuff just wasn't going right. I let Jesse know - and that same day he delivered more technicians to my doorstep.

Thankfully, they had somehow managed to secure a better location on a nearby building to place their SM - which had a direct line of sight to their own broadcasting tower and had hoped it would provide better connections.

On top of the fewer drops, Citescape managed to coax out a huge amount more bandwidth for us than we were initially signed up for. We're now managing 4Mbp/sDown and 1.5Mbp/sUp; which provides more than enough consolation for the initial problems with setup.

So, how's the service you ask? The actual ISP end of it? It's amazing. Citescape is a wonderful ISP who gets you onto the internet, and then gets the hell out of the way. Port filtering? None. I was able to download the latest Ubuntu release at full tilt thanks to the joys of BitTorrent. Traffic shaping? None. I've observed steady net speeds of 4/1.5 with no issues. Amazing.

Summing it up. We got off to a rocky start with Citescape, but they've truly pulled through with both their superb customer service and their amazing abilities as an ISP. Here's to hoping they stay the same as they grow!

(CitEscape is a St. Cloud, MN area "wireless" ISP using Motorla's Canopy broadcasting system to get to their main data connection)