Seems to be common. I just had to leave Time Warner after years because their AOL merger brought once good service down to AOL levels. My solution was to register my own domain and use that for all my mail so I can hop around local ISP's as necessary without sending out new e-mail address reminders each time.
For years now, Fox Internet has been my ISP. Even when they raised their rates, the service was good enough and reliable enough that I stayed with them. I may even have recommended them to others in this group.
Well, early this year they sold out to an organization called Y3K. Since then, it's been a steady deterioration, at least in the Spokane area.
I think I've given them enough time to fix their problems, so I'm looking for a replacement. A site that ranks ISPs available in a given area has good things to say about a company called InterGate. Anyone here have good or bad comments about InterGate?
Thanks.
I don't know, but keep in mind you can get a newsfeed from other than your ISP, and email can also be handled by another provider. I've been doing this for some time now (while getting my network connectivity yet a third or fourth way) which lets me change things around alot while keeping the same address, killfile, etc. I'm happy with the free newsserver at cis.dfn.de, and very happy with the spamfiltering that spamcop.net does for me. If you just see the ISP as someone to give you basic connectivity, it frees up the decision process a bit.
Dave Hinz
dave, their rules "require" that the sender's address be legit. Do they REALLY enforce such a bizarre requirement, with all the spamming going on? Most folks don't want their true email address to be posted anywhere on the web.
dave
Dave Hinz wrote: I'm happy with the
My ISP is Peoplepc. I like it a lot. I will recommend it to you. Take care. Joe
cis.dfn.de is now news.individual.net and I've happily used them (and readfreenews) for some time. Yes they require a valid email address, but suggest a couple of places you can get a free account and use it as a garbage collector. See my header - I use fastmail.fm.
thanks, Larry. is the latency pretty short? as in just a minute or two?
dave
Larry Blanchard wrote:
I've never seen anything over a few seconds, and that's getting the connection. If I click on an article header, I get the text almost instantly.
Of course there are exceptions when the whole net is bogged down, but I haven't known them to be any slower than anything else.
The only drawback is that they have a short timeout - about 5 minutes, so if I spend a long time composing a response I have to reconnect. Doesn't happen often.
Sounds like you need one of those little stay-connected programs. It's designed to prevent disconnection by pinging the server every few minutes or whatever period you set.
Well, with the newsserver we both use, it's not a huge deal; I'm using 'slrn' as a newsreader, which authenticates for me and I don't lose anything, just get the two second "reconnecting to server ...." message. It's gone down twice in the last couple of years; much more reliable than any ISP newsserver that I've ever paid for.
Dave Hinz
Plus a lot of news servers forbid the use of those programs.
My ISP used to scribe to newsfeeds or corp.newsgroups, a crappy new provider and late last year change to Supernews. Supernews is VERY fast and long retention time. Supernews have something like 90,000 plus articles on rec.woodworking. Newsguy is also fairly a reasonable news provider. Another good one is Talkway, and now it's no longer free.
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