Looking for Service From a Service
Is there anybody out there who doesn’t hate his or her Internet service provider? You can’t imagine the litany of wrongdoing laid at the door of this accursed breed by aggrieved users. To anyone who hangs around the right newsgroups, the complaints are well-known: can’t dial in, service cuts off in mid-session, brain-dead technical support, can’t cancel account, disappearing e-mail--the list goes on and on.
All this time, I’d been feeling a faint sense of superiority. I, after all, was with a friendly little provider that few people knew about and hardly anyone seemed to dislike. Caprica was kind of quirky and had a sense of humor about itself. Their most recent motto is “One of LA Basin’s Internet Providers,” and despite my nagging, they never did get around to sending out bills.
So the price was certainly right, and most of the time, Caprica functioned. When something went wrong, moreover, you didn’t get some faceless techie. You got James Lummel or Ken Taira, who own the service, know a lot about computer networking and were so deeply involved with Caprica that one of them shared living quarters with the server.
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Unfortunately, Caprica went down on Jan. 15, not just for a few hours, or even a whole day, but for more than a week at last count. If you are nursing any bucolic images of the cyberspace addict who takes new joy in life when forced to rediscover family life and philately, get rid of them. I was forced to use America Online for accessing the World Wide Web, which is easy but slow and expensive, and people sending e-mail to me at Caprica couldn’t get through. Worse yet, mail sent to me at my cherished domain, akst.com, was returned to sender with “Host unknown (Name server: akst.com: no data known).” Ugh.
Fond as I was of James and Ken (who insist that Caprica will be back), it seemed clear that I needed to find an industrial-strength Internet provider. I would need a full-blown PPP account, with telnet, ftp and so forth. My problem is that, like a tenant with 14 cats, I can’t move just anywhere. There is my Web page, for instance, and then there is also my domain. Any provider I signed up with would have to accommodate both. And since I spend so much time online, I can’t pay $2.95 an hour for connect time.
CompuServe was the obvious choice; I have an account there already, and they offer a good price for heavy users. But my Web address would be long and unwieldy, and to my knowledge CompuServe isn’t equipped to handle individual user domains.
Homeless, I began wandering the Internet in search of a place to live, visiting MecklerMedia’s list of Internet service providers, or ISPs, at https://thelist.com/. I looked first for those with local dial-ins in my area code--who needs long-distance charges?--but ruled out quirky little regional providers. Then I started making phone calls.
The results weren’t pretty. The person who answered at IDT, for instance, seemed to know little except that he wanted me off the phone. GNN is a good deal but doesn’t support individual domains. At PSI, the woman who answered said, “I’ll have to transfer you to corporate,” where the man who answered immediately tried to transfer me back to “individual services.”
Netcom, where I used to have an old-fashioned “shell” account that one uses from a command line, at first kept me on hold, but when I tried back later, took a different tack and became chronically busy. This was the problem at PacificNet too.
PrimeNet, employing more sophisticated customer-repellent techniques, put me on the voice-mail equivalent of a Mobius strip. I kept pressing 3 for new accounts, was assured I was being transferred, and then got the same recording--for new accounts, press 3--all over again. At Uunet, where I’d left a message, my call was returned at 6:10 a.m. Pacific time, when Morpheus put his foot down.
Good grief. If this is how they treat sales, I thought, imagine how these outfits must be treating the customers they already have.
Running out of alphabet, I finally called the Well in Sausalito, Calif. The Well used to be famous as a highly idiosyncratic system with fascinating “conferences,” or forums, that were closed to outsiders. That’s still the Well, sort of, but it’s also a national Internet provider now.
To my amazement, I immediately got a coherent person on the phone, and unlike the people at some competing Internet services, he knew exactly what I was talking about and took reasonably good care of me, even though I hadn’t disclosed my status as the Walter Winchell of cyberspace. Contritely, I made a mental note never again to use the terms “tie-dyed,” ’ex-hippie” or “Celestial Seasonings” in talking about the Well, and signed up for an account on the spot.
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At $20 a month for 20 hours and $2 an hour after that, the Well is not a bad deal for PPP service (access to the Well conferences is $5 per month extra). The Well is also well-established, has local dial-ins all over the country, permits user Web pages with a simple URL, and can even accommodate user domains, although it doesn’t yet allow e-mail to any.old.thing@akst.com. The Well assures me this capability is coming soon. The downside: It doesn’t carry Southern California regional groups such as la.general and la.eats.
For readers in a quandary similar to mine, I must confess there is no easy answer. If you don’t care about having your own domain but need a lot of reliable online time anywhere in the world, use CompuServe. If you just want ease of use and don’t spend hours and hours cruising, you can’t beat America Online, but watch that meter.
If money is very much an object and uninterrupted service isn’t mission-critical, as the saying goes, cheap local providers usually can’t be beat. And there’s always the Los Angeles Free-Net (e-mail info@lafn.org). Just don’t yowl too much when that quirky little system goes down or occasionally confronts you with a busy signal. On the Internet, as in life, you generally get what you pay for.
BTW: In discussing Java last week, I should have noted that, as a 32-bit application, it won’t work with Windows 3.1. You need to be using the 32-bit version of Netscape Navigator 2.0 with Windows 95. Sun says it hopes to announce a Macintosh version soon.
Daniel Akst can be reached via e-mail at Dan.Akst@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.well.com/~akst.
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Net Access
A World Wide Web page comparing prices of the major online services as well as the larger Internet service providers is maintained by 16-year-old Jay Barker at https://www.accessone.com/~shwaap/onlines.html. You can also sample Internet service complaints in the newsgroup alt.online-service. And there are specific alt.online-service.* groups for some individual Internet service providers.
