[ale] Screwed by PPP0E

[Geoffrey]

Christopher Fowler wrote:
> I came into my remote office today to discover that Speedfactory had
> switched me over to PPPOE.  Apparently they sent one of my partners an
> email and I've not received it.  This causes pain because the only
> reason why I've not switched to PPPOE and their faster speed before was
> because I could not afford the downtime.

This is being forced upon them by BellSouth.  BellSouth jacks the price 
of the non-pppoe connections and passes it down the chain.

It's my understanding that pppoe is easier for BellSouth to provision 
(hardware as well as initialization).

> 
> They told me that everyone was forced to go to PPPOE.  Is this true? 
> What about Speakeasy.

I went to pppoe with Speedfactory a while back in order to get the 
higher speed.  I rarely  have connectivity loss, when I do, my firewall 
redials and I'm right back on.  I have a cron job that pings to keep the 
line up and I retain the failed data.  I've had one major outage that 
was caused by upstream problems.  Other then that, every other failure 
shows a single ping failure which means the connection was back up with 
5 seconds.

> I will add this. <flamebait>The only reason I've not switched to
> BS</flamebait> is because of the level of support I get from these
> guys.  They helped me setup PPPOE on Linux twice.  BS would say "Linux
> is not supported".  They've returned my calls and have called me back
> when things began working again.  Now since I'm forced to go  PPPOE my
> only thing keeping me with SF is the support.  Does SE force PPPOE?

Can't help you with this, although I think everyone knows my opinion 
about BellSouth...

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey