Internet Connectivity Revisited

Mar 23 23:17 UTC 2001

I (as a concerned net.citizen for grex) think that Grex should
be on its toes to be prepared to change internet providers
for two reasons.

1) Voyager.net (Acquired by CoreComm, NASDAQ COMM) is presently
trading under $1/share.  This means there is a timer ticking
within NASDAQ to get them delisted and cause the company
to become a private company instead of a publicly held one.

2) Covad (NASDAQ COVD) presently does not have any problems with
providing services, Grex should not ignore the fact that the
DSL marketplace has gotten more distressed with Northpoint
(www.northpoint.net) scheduled to turn off service to
its customers very soon.  (I believe in days).  These two factors
are cause for concern of continued service.

It is my opinion that grex should be prepared to change the present
contract to month-to-month service and consider the alternatives at the
end of the present contract.

I see no immediate threat of service disruption by Covad/Voyager(CoreComm)
today but in the coming months I think this is a real threat.

response 2 of 176:

Mar 23 23:51 UTC 2001

Our current contract, if I'm reading it right, runs from our activation date
(which should have been 7/15/2000 but was actually 8/2/2000) for a 12 month
term.  If we don't notify them at least 30 days in advance of the date of
the end of the contract (which is 7/2 I think, but we should get it in by
6/15 just to be sure), it automatically renews for a 12-month term.  If they
want to change our rates, they have to tell us 60 days before the end of the
current contract.

What are the implications of Voyager becoming a private company?  (Or is it
CoreComm that is doing so badly?)

response 4 of 176:

Mar 24 00:20 UTC 2001

I don't know specifically about CoreComm, but from the stock price I can
probably guess.  A lot of companies are now running into trouble due to
business plans that counted on continuing to be able to sell stock for a while
before needing to become profitable.  Given what's happened to the stock
market over the last several months, that isn't much of an option anymore for
any of those companies, and becomes especially impractical for companies whose
stock price has sunk as low as CoreComm, or Northpoint, Covad, and another
company I'm not allowed to mention.  If a company's stock has become
worthless, and there isn't enough money in the bank to keep the company afloat
until it can start making a profit and supporting itself, the company's long
term chances of staying in business aren't great.  And of course, when the
company's long term chances of staying in business aren't good, the stock
price sinks even more, forming a rather vicious circle.

I assume from the stock price that CoreComm isn't profitable at the moment.
Is that a correct assumption?

I'm not sure not renewing the CoreComm/Voyager contract would be a good idea.
Until recently, it seemed that companies like that would get bought rather
than going out of business, although at this point the whole industry is doing
badly enough that there may not be anybody who wants them and can afford to
buy them.  By the same token, though, I'm not sure how many ISPs are really
financially stable, so I don't know if switching would really buy us anything.
Certainly, if CoreComm does go under, we aren't going to be held to the
contract once the service no longer exists.

response 6 of 176:

Mar 30 20:45 UTC 2001

Jared has raised a real issue.  I would like to see more discussion.
I am particularly concerned because when Northpoint turned off its
service it gave almost no notice to its customers.

response 8 of 176:

Apr 1 02:44 UTC 2001

Another problem when companies get bought out is that the quality of their
service sometimes changes substantially, such that buying from them can become
not nearly as desireable as it previously was.

It is my understanding that reconnecting the ISDN line would also require
finding an ISP to dial up to, and that it may or may not be possible to find
as good a deal as grex previously had.

Switching to a different ISP that uses covad might be desireable; speakeasy.net
comes to mind as one that I've heard good things about, although I don't
know how their price compares to what grex has been getting, etc.

It seems to be the case that a lot of the DSL market was selling services
at below what they could sustainably charge, and most people tended to be
unaware of that, but I think expecting ISP costs to go up a bit is not
especially unreasonable.

response 10 of 176:

Apr 6 01:22 UTC 2001

I get the impression that no one is going to think about this until 
it is too late and Grex is off the net for an extended period of time.
(like, a month or so.)

From looking at the business and tech pages, it looks to me like       
the entire group of independent DSL providers is crashing.
Possibly we need to think about either moving to Ameritech as 
our DSL provider -- if Ameritech goes bust, Grex will be the least 
of our worries -- or abandoning the DSL technology.
 
Joel in resp:8 :: yes, if Grex has to drop back to ISDN, we will have to 
find an ISP in a hurry, and we'll probably never get a donated connection
like we had before.  But having an ISDN line at the pumpkin would have 
given us the technical flexibility to connect to any local ISP.

response 12 of 176:

Apr 6 03:12 UTC 2001

There are some local providers that sell dsl that is provisioned through
ameritech.  (instead of covad, northpoint, etc....)

Ameritech has gotten more data savvy in the past year from my
experience and sees that there is value in this space.  Especially
in the days of the collapsing clecs :)

response 14 of 176:

Apr 6 06:04 UTC 2001

(I seem to remember the argument against colocation was ease of access,
as in "lack thereof."  is that argument no longer valid?)

response 16 of 176:

Apr 7 23:29 UTC 2001

Colo space is one of those things where pricing, reliability, ease of access,
and so forth, vary considerably.  It's a matter of shopping for the right
deal.

response 18 of 176:

Apr 15 18:30 UTC 2001

Yes, Ameritech is offering basically what Covad, Northpoint, Rythmns, etc..
are offering to isps.  (This is my understanding after talking to someone
who is doing this with their company, etc...)

response 20 of 176:

Apr 18 03:42 UTC 2001

Is your WWNet co-lo a special 501(c)3 or M-Net deal rate?  How many U's
of rack space are included?  What kind of bandwidth?  (Etc.?)

response 22 of 176:

Apr 20 02:32 UTC 2001

I ought to point out that m-net's needs are easily demonstrated to be
different.  Firstly, m-net has no dial-in lines.  Secondly, m-net has
had a history of "tolerating" fairly long outages.  Thirdly, m-net's
financial picture is quite different from grex.

response 24 of 176:

Apr 20 04:00 UTC 2001

(you mean "rents.")  :P

(you really ought to spend more time thinking your responses 
through.)  ;)