Yesterday was the singularly worst service I think I’ve ever had from an ISP.

Be’s network started suffering from very high packet loss around midday – it carried on until late evening (9 or 10pm).

In all this time, it was impossible to get through to their call centre – not surprising given the scale of the problem. There was no acknowledgement of there even being a problem until midafternoon when something was posted on their forum.

We all know that it’s only human to suffer problems – it is bleeding edge technology after all. What riles me above all other is the total lack of communication to customers.

So, how about it Be, maybe you could put up a status page like every other ISP?

Now, I don’t normally do these online petition things very often, but this is different.

AOL are proposing to start charging (large corporations who send large amount of email) to email AOL subscribers. This is all being done in the name of an anti-spam measure, but it will only end up creating a two tier email system.

Some may argue that this is all that AOL subscribers deserve, but it does set a dangerous precedent.

Add your name!

As from today, Mailbox Internet, now have none of their original technical staff at their colo centre in Parson’s Green. Their new owners, 186k, have plans to close it and move all the servers up to Leeds, although there’s been no official notification of this.

Because of this, I’ve moved my server out of a nice cold dedicated data centre and into my study at home. It has a fairly healthy upload speed, so performance won’t be affected.

It has also unfortunately coincided with same major problems on my new ISP’s network – mostly involving DNS it seems. I’m now running my own internal DNS to work around these issues; it also solves the problem I had with port forwarding on my router (it would redirect any HTTP requests to the public WAN IP to the internal router configuration page).

So, I’m now signed up with BE for their ADSL2+ service. Although it can go up to 24Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up, I’m currently getting 7Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

This isn’t too shabby considering that a friend who lives another 100m further down the road is right on the verge of 2Mbps "normal" ADSL.

All in all, service is good so far, everything was working to schedule (in fact earlier than promised); so if you fancy signing up and want a month’s free BE service, contact me (you can do that via the comments) and I’ll send you the relevant refer-a-friend email address to add to your order.