And now it’s time to tell you a story of an ISP gone terribly wrong. I signed up for DSL through a local company, Iowa Network Services, about seven months ago. Out of the ISPs available, this appeared to be the least expensive one which would provide me with static IP addresses and not mind too much if I hosted my own services. The circuit, of course, was provided by Qwest, the local telephone company.

I paid Qwest $28.00 for a 1536/896 circuit, and Iowa Network Services $28.95 for ISP service monthly.

Right from the start I had problems. The DSL would only train at around 1068/420 or less. I called up Qwest, they sent out a technician, who said nothing was wrong, and it must be the ISP. But I was getting transfer speeds all over the map, anywhere from 99% to 5% of the trained speed. So I call Iowa Network Services, who said that nothing was wrong, and it must be Qwest. This pattern would repeat itself several times over the next few months.

Anyway, I learned to live with it, I guess. A couple of months later, on a nice Saturday morning, I completely lost dialtone on my line. I called up Qwest, they sent out a technician two hours later, and he took about two hours to fix the line. He also said he found something on the line that would interfere with my DSL and fixed that as well. From that time, the DSL modem trained at 1536/800, and things appeared to be much better on the DSL end of things as well. For about two days.

Monday morning rolls around, and it’s back to weird slowdowns, sometimes even slower than dialup. I call up Iowa Network Services, whose tech support again tells me nothing’s wrong and it must be my computer. So I packed up the laptop and went downtown, plugged it in to the Ethernet at the public library, and I got good consistent high speeds out of it. So much for it being the computer. This makes the second time that INS’s tech support proves their worthlessness.

A few more months pass, and I find this nice site called Broadband Reports. On there I found several threads from other people having similar troubles. I posted to one of them, and very quickly got the response “Your ISP is oversubscribed” from an anonymous person who says he works in Qwest DSL tech support. Apparently they have only one T1 for all of their customers in my central office! He then clued me in to the existence of Qwest Choice Internet Basic, a DSL ISP normally offered to business customers, but residential customers who know about it can sign up for it. I thought about it for a while, and as things didn’t seem to be improving at all with Iowa Network Services, last Tuesday (25 Jan) I called Qwest and signed up. They said I would be up and running on 1 Feb.

Half an hour later, my DSL was dead. I called up Qwest, who informed me that according to information he had received, Iowa Network Services was experiencing a major network outage. I waited about six hours, and called them up. They said there was a network outage, but that I wasn’t in an affected area, and they had no idea what was wrong with my service. The tech support person literally told me there was nothing they could do and refused to even look into the matter. The next day I tried to check their webmail, and found that my name and password no longer worked. Wow! They disconnected my service! So that’s why it doesn’t work!

So Iowa Network Services kills my connection a week before the cutover date, and won’t turn it back on. Way to make a parting impression on an already dissatisfied customer.

Anyway, a week goes by, and uncounted numbers of people can’t get to my site to read my pointless babblings or download the WordPress SpamAssassin Plugin to protect their own sites from comment spam. I’m furious, of course, but there’s little I can do. Qwest could not move up the due date, unfortunately. I have no problem with that, as I understand why it takes a week to provision DSL. In the meantime I decide to spend a week or so away from computers, and wrote not one word on this site…

And now we’re back up, and that’s my rant. If you’re a customer of Iowa Network Services (aka NetINS) please consider this rant in the spirit in which it was intended. And if you work for Iowa Network Services, please consider getting tech support people who have a clue! And put them on the payroll. Outsourcing tech support is not a good idea.