Dealing with Verizon
Asking around at work, Northwest Nexus seemed to be a good ISP, so I signed up with them. They even gave me a class C address of my own for use over a dial up connection, and had a subdomain of their wa.com domain, namely bluegum.wa,com. I wanted a domain name that was Australian sounding (even if only to Australians), but which also had no letter 'A' in it, as American's hearing perceives my pronounciation of 'A' as 'I'. Hence, no As. Bluegum fits that bill, so that was it.
I had excellent service from Northwest Nexus, although it took me a while to figure out how their billing system handled changes of service. But they didn't appear to be robbing me, so I didn't try too hard.
By mid 1997, for a variety of reasons, it seemed a good idea to have a domain name of my own, not a subdomain of somebody else. So I had Northwest Nexus register bluegum.com for me, and also switched to a full time connection via ISDN. Moving from about 28 kbits/sec dialup to permanent connection at 128 kbits/sec was quite an improvement! Of course, it also meant I had to put a firewall on the connection machine, since now my system(s) were open to probing by all and sundry on the net, not all of whom are nice. I also gave up my class C address and dropped to just 16 IP addresses.
Then in late 1998, DSL started to become available in the Seattle area serviced by (the then) GTE phone company. I called, and said I'd be interested. However, the required equipment was not yet installed in my telephone exchange, so I had to wait. By the middle of 1999, I had DSL installed, and then dropped the ISDN service. The phone company bill remained about the same, but the ISP bill dropped to about one third of its previous value! Quite nice. I stayed with Northwest Nexus, as they had provided first rate service, with the number of out-of-service periods being very few.
Then in February 2000, when I was in Australia, I received a refund cheque from WinStar. Since it was in the pile of mail when I returned, I deposited it into the bank, without figuring out what it was for. I just assumed it was part of the change over to DSL from a few months earlier. As I said above, I never did entirely figure out how they handled service change billing.
Then a few months later, I noticed that I wasn't being billed any more. They were taking the money directly from a credit card, and it's not quite so obvious when a bill is misssing, as opposed to when there is soemthing extra on the bill. Figuring this was just a hiccup, I let it go a couple more months, but there was still no sign of being charged, I decided I had better call them up to fix it.
Several months later, and still not hearing anything, I called again. I don't recall if it was the same person I spoke to, but was left with the definite impression that I was bothering them by calling. So nothing out of that call.
At some stage here, I also sent them email. I heard nothing back.
In early 2001, I sent them a genuine letter. I didn't register it, though that might have been interesting. At least I'd have known that somebody received it. I had no response from that either.
So, I guess they weren't interested in billing me. My concern, of course, was that at some stage, the billing and connection records systems are going to catch up, and they'll disable my connection.
So by summer, I was beginning to think that it might be time to find another ISP before this one stops working. Some discussions I had seen on an email list mentioned several alternatives.
In early August, my DSL service was not connected to anything. The 'modem' lights were all normal, but I could not 'ping' the router at the far end. Not a good sign, but they may have had some sort of equipment failure, OR they may have gone out of business. Since I wasn't a customer (according to their administation), I would not be notified of such an event, assuming that anybody would have been.
By the morning of the second day, I called Verizon (GTE had merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon, my 'new' phone company) to see if they had DSL problems. There was a recorded message (before reaching a service rep) mentioning WinStar connection problems.
I was greeted by the standard voice mail type system, with the message "Dial the extension of the party you want now". That was it. No connect to operator for assistance, etc. So I presuem they do NOT want new customers.
Calling Genuity's local number received a similar response, with the exception that there was an 800 number to call for technical difficulties. Since there was probably a human on the end of that line (eventually!) I called. And lo and behold, they actually had menu items for new customers! Ah, it must be my lucky day.
Well, it was - eventually. The first person I spoke to told me that I was not in their targer market, both in terms of service and locality. Turns out he was on the east coast. He transferred me to a more appropriate person, but she dealt with regular customers, while I want business service, so I was again transferred, finally arriving at Verizon's Business ISP.