Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Ron Thigpen <rthigpen AT nc.rr.com>]

I'm not sure any one broadband provider in our area could give you truly 
reliable service.

Using RR is a bit like shopping at BestBuy, its great, as long as you 
don't have to talk to anybody.  And they've definitely been having a bad 
week.  I've seen a few multiday issues with mail service, but this is 
the worst IP connectivity spell I've noticed them having.  It does look 
like they did some "planned maintennance" last night, so I'm hoping that 
 will fix thing for now.

RR does have a network status page that at least can confirm when you 
are seeing system wide, rather than user specific, issues. 
<http://help.rr.com/asp/networkstatus.asp>

Also, as a stopgap to keep you online during the brownouts, RR has a 
dialup offering as well.  see: <http://dialaccess.rr.com>  It's free for 
the next few months.  I've never used it.  Of course there's NetZero, 
Juno, et.al.

Some network appliances have a failover feature where they'll start 
using an external modem via a serial port if the WAN connection goes 
out.  Same applies to multiple WAN ports if you wanted to pay for the 
appliance plus two broadband accounts.

HTH,

--rt

Craig Duncan wrote:
> At one point in time I sang their praises, but over the past few months the 
> service has been appalling. Lots of outages and useless tech support.