DSL's down, and I don't care

So as of November, we've got a new place to live now, right in downtown Vancouver. It's back in the West End; I lived there for seven years, and with my (now) wife for two of those. We moved out to the sticks for cheaper rent and a bigger place, but realized we missed downtown: most of our friends are here, and there was really nothing much where we were living. It was (is) a nice place, but a bit of a black hole as far as things to do go.

We were lucky, and found a nice place; the building manager took a shine to us, I guess, and offered us the place as we were looking at it. It costs more but it's about the same size as our current place, and we're happy to be moving back.

'Course, this does bring up the question of Internet access. I'm hosting five websites on Thornhill, the Linux server, and doing DNS for another domain that belongs to a friend of mine. My ISP is not the greatest value; a static IP is currently costing me an extra $80 per month (and the TOS still prohibit servers, although they've yet to enforce it), and I just can't justify that with the extra rent we'll be paying. That means going to DHCP, dynamic DNS, and I don't know what-all.

There are other options, of course. Shaw is the local cable company, and I could always go to ADSL. God knows there's lots of choices there; I used to work for one of them. However, my experience there has made me extremely wary of ADSL in Vancouver.

We resold ADSL service from a company that I don't want to name; let's just say that if you think of the c in E=mc2, you'll think of their name. When we started I was quite impressed: static IP address (usually a 10.something, but public ones were available if you asked) and servers were okay. But then it turned into this absolute nightmare:

• It turned out that they weren't the main movers and shakers for the service. We knew they resold to other companies -- they made no secret of that -- so our assumption (because we were too stupid to ask, that's why) was that they controlled the equipment. But they didn't. How did we find that out? Follow the bouncing ball:

• They originally set up 3Com modems so that they could query them via SNMP for traffic stats, because their business model involved giving away a small amount of bandwidth suitable for most people if you didn't include file-sharing, then banging the people who overshot at $20/GB (at least, that was what we charged).

• Only the 3Coms didn't work as well as planned, and anyway were in the customer's hands so you couldn't really trust them anyhow. So they went to MAC address-based traffic counting. Free bonus: MAC address-based filtering, too -- you had to have a MAC address the router knew about, or you couldn't get out of their private network. Only that bit they didn't tell us about. Yep, they didn't say a thing.

• We found this out because we had people who suddenly couldn't connect. With much prodding we could get the people we knew to try and fix things. Usually, it wouldn't last too long, and we were back to square one. Connectivity was utterly erratic; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and there wasn't a blessed thing we could do about it except plead with our upstream folks for help. Of course, we were doing all this while pretending to the customer that we had our hands directly on all the misbehaving equipment. This was when we began to suspect that we were in the same naive position as our customers.

• Eventually, we discovered that was, in fact, the case. Every time we called up to beg and plead, we were one of a half-dozen ISPs. And then they would have to go beg and plead for help on our behalf to their shadowy masters. Unless it was after 5pm, of course, which turned out to be quitting time when you're a shadowymaster. Whee!

• We found out that we were supposed to be able to add MAC addresses via a web app (IE only, of course, just to make things even more fun), and then those MAC addresses would be allowed out. This did not work. More prodding told us that they were working on it, and it would work Real Soon Now.

• With even more prodding it came out that the reason this was all happening was because there were problems with the database that held the MAC addresses of the customers. When the database had problems, the routers defaulted to DENY rather than the perhaps more sensible option of just letting the fucking packet through, we'll fix it later.

• Then we found out the database was MS-SQL, and wondered if that might be part of the problem too.

• Then Blaster hit.

• Then many, many months later, we started getting bills, which had not been coming in all this time, from our upstream people. This wasn't just for service for x customers over y months, of course; no, that would be too simple. Instead, this was bandwidth for x customers over y months, including the people who turned on Kazaa then went on vacation for a week. Records were either non- existent or untrustworthy, and neither we nor the customers'd had a way of checking their usage. (That too was coming Real Soon Now.) Of course we had to get some money from the customers -- at $20/GB, remember, and some people were 100 GB over their limit. You try talking to a customer who's just got a bill for $2000 for usage over the last n months, when they were expecting $39.95 plus tax.

Christ almighty, it was such a giant clusterfuck. I began to sing between support calls, to the tune of "Jimmy Crack Corn":

A customer called in to 'fess Our techn'cal service was the best So why was he in such distress? The database dropped his MAC address. Sing it! DSL's down, and I don't care DSL's down, and I don't care DSL's down, and I don't care -- It's Lightspeed's fault again!

Eventually it did begin to work, and from what I understand it does quite well today. But still...shudder. Never again.

They resold their services to a bunch of different local ISPs, most of which I recognised (can't remember who they are now, worse luck), that I'm deathly afraid of getting stuck in the giant sucking wound that is Lightspeed Internet.

There's Telus, of course, but they're liable to be even worse; they've been going through hellacious layoffs in the last year, and horror stories abound about the wretched customer service these days. In fact, they're even being investigated by the CRTC because of the number of complaints. Besides, Telus' service was spotty to begin with; their DHCP servers would go down frequently, and take people's connection with it. (Ha. It got to the point where the only selling point I could repeat in good conscience was the fact that our tech support people were easier to reach than Telus'.)

So...unless I can find an ISP with a penchant for handing out cheap static IP addresses and being generous with traffic, I'll do dynamic DNS. Some day I'll colocate, or get a virtual server. Until then, I'll settle for cheap.