I’m with a small London ISP called Mailbox. For the past five years, their service has been absolutely excellent and I have really enjoyed being a customer – even when things didn’t work out, I could call up and speak to a really tech savvy support person or two. I like small ISPs because they usually care about you a little.
Mailbox recently got bought out by 186K, who have immediately closed down the London office (making various cool people redundant in the process). Last night, I had another dropout in my ADSL (completely unexplained, no logs on their site, no known infrastructure issue but my Linux box was unable to establish a ppp connection over an ATM circuit). I tried calling them today but just got through to a silly phone system and email has been unreliable too. I’ll speak to them on Monday, but I’m not a happy bunny. ADSL Guide surveys show that I’m not alone in thinking things have gotten worse.
Looks like I might be in the market for a new ADSL provider. I’m thinking of going with Blackcat (they’re the most competent people I know who run a full time ADSL service for a living), in which case I’ll have to sink a few hundred GBP in running two parallel services and in having the second ADSL connection installed while things are moved over. It’s just plain annoying. I feel bad for the guys at 186K too because they can’t enjoy having to put up with the upset people I’ve spoken to IRC about the Mailbox situation.
UPDATE: strike two! ADSL went down again the next night for a period of time. Three strikes and I think Mailbox are outta here.
Jon.
Out of interest, why do you feel the need to have two connections run in parallel? Migration is generally easy enough and just requires you to put new login credentials into your router and reboot it when the changeover happens. We can let you know your IP address(es) in advance if you need to be able to prepare DNS changeover and so on.
Cheers,
Dominic (of the aforementioned Black Cat Networks)