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More istop fun

I’ve complained here in the past about my ISP,
IStop, and how well they tend
to live up to their name. Lately, though, they’ve been improving
in reliability quite a bit. I’m still not sure if I’d recommend them
for everybody, but I think I’m going to stick around for a while.

Today, all IStop DSL subscribers got mail from the company president.
With no increase in price (C$29.95/mo, plus $10/mo modem rental,
plus $4/mo for a static ISP, which in US$ is $22, $7, and $3
respectively), we’re getting an increase in monthly transfer limits
from 15GB to 20GB, and an increase in speed to 1.7Mb down and 384kb up,
from 1.2/160.

I note the above for my American friends using ADSL.

Two more fun quotes from the email:

In an effort to further improve customer service we are
looking to add another support technician to our staff. Interested
parties should query the DNS txt record for jobs.istop.com.

I love it — what a great way to weed out the first set of no-hires?
And:

If you do refer someone, ask them to put your istop.com
userid in the comments field of the signup page. If you refer a few
GOOD customers, we’ll try to return the favor in an appopriate way,
such as a free t-shirt, extra bandwidth, free modem, etc. And if you
refer a few BAD customers, we’ll let you know to send the rest of
your friends to our competition ;-)

Stuff like this is why I like using a mom and pop ISP.


Rich

9 responses to “More istop fun”

  1. that rocks. i downloaded the iq test for shits and giggles. :p

    i wish we had a local mom and pop isp who aren’t complete retards. i could probably score a job with them.

  2. FYI, all DSL customers in the city are getting that speed upgrade courtesy of Symaptico upgrading the equipment. It’s not something special they’re doing for you, except for the transfer limits.

    My mom & pop ISP here in town (dsl.ca) gives me static IP and no bandwidth cap at all. ^_^ At no extra charge. It’s the “Freaks & Geeks Family Plan.” (Informally, of course.)

  3. I wouldn’t have put it past Ralph to charge more after the upgrade, and he isn’t, so I’m happy. :-)

    The guy who referred me to IStop was about 8′ from the CO, so got 6Mb down for the price of 3. He was a friend of Ralph’s, though.

  4. This reminds me of my hosting provider (DreamHost). While not an ISP, just a hosting company, they know their stuff, they run things extremely well, and certainly have that mom and pop mentality. I think I have posted excerpts from their newsletters in the past, for for an immediate concrete example, last month’s newsletter was written entirely by “a robot” and had links to pictures of him/it and his family. It had the appropriate literary style to be a 50’s sci-fi robot, and I think it even had references to pushing, shoving, and stairs in your house. Their online knowledge base even includes things like “Q: What happen? A: All your base are belong to us.”

    Putting the job stuff in a rarely used DNS record type is genius, though. I think I need to convince my company to do something similar but more slanted toward programming than IT.

  5. Heh. I can’t connect to their site.

    What model is the modem? I’ve got a couple hanging around that might possibly in some normal world work, or are you required to rent it?

  6. Heh. I can’t connect to their site.

    Yeah, well, see my latest post. :-)

    What model is the modem? I’ve got a couple hanging around that might possibly in some normal world work, or are you required to rent it?

    Generic, made by some Japanese keiretsu I’ve never heard of. It’s just standard ADSL, POTS in one hole and ethernet in the other. It’s probably easier to start with “Well, what do you have?” :-)

  7. hehe. The internet can be fun sometimes. I did a traceroute to work one time and got about 20 hops.

    It’s probably easier to start with “Well, what do you have?”

    I knew you were going to say that as soon as I posted. I’ll have to dig them out and look. About all I know right now is one’s a Fujitsu (actually, I have two of those), and there was some change made to my line after a reconnection that made that not compatible (which took them a month to figure out), so I got another one. Earthlink liked to give me modems. Anyway, yeah, I’ll look a little later and get back to you.

  9. Yes, some friends of mine switched to istop ADSL from sympatico ADSL. I am not sure if they had the old original “good” DSL or the crappy HSE with PPPoE. I suspect the later. I have been tempted as well after a rash of sympatico ADSL outages. As I work from home, I need reliable connectivity. But I have the older “good” DSL as you know so I’d prefer to add connectivity rather than switch.. Maybe I can get a cheap dialup plan from istop for those occasionaly outages instead. hrmmm ;-)