Article: 59917 of panix.chat Path: news.panix.com!panix3.panix.com!not-for-mail From: gp@panix.com (Greg Pratt) Newsgroups: panix.chat Subject: Primenet and Frontiernet: globally cross Date: 1 Sep 2001 17:36:48 -0400 Organization: Panix Lines: 107 Message-ID: <9mrkdg$42h$1@panix3.panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com X-Trace: news.panix.com 999380185 2118 166.84.1.3 (1 Sep 2001 21:36:25 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 1 Sep 2001 21:36:25 GMT Keywords: Frontiernet Primenet Global Crossing Citizens Communications ISP evil X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001) Xref: news.panix.com panix.chat:59917 I'm not a Primenet survivor, nor a refugee from Netcom. Yes, folks, a new class of "displaced person" has been born: the ex-Frontiernet user. I've already perused this newsgroup and see some familiar names, so a handful of you might even recognize me. I was a long-time Frontiernet user, from August 1997 until August 2001. I've finally jumped ship, and am very glad that I did. This tale is a little lengthy, but it's worth reading, especially if you're another refugee from one of the Global Crossing companies. Frontiernet started out as a local ISP unit of Frontier Telephone of Rochester, which was part of Frontier Communications. While they began offering national service, their user base was still centered in Rochester. Somewhere along the way, Frontiernet bought another localized ISP, Primenet. The original hope was to combine the two services by consolidating the best of both systems. Two things happened to interfere with that: (1) Frontiernet realized that it was, from a business perspective, more trouble than it was worth, and (2) Frontier Communications was acquired by Global Crossing, the networking giant. Global Crossing inherited Frontiernet and Primenet, but decided that it didn't want to keep Primenet. As many of you are painfully aware, Primenet was essentially phased out of existence. Many people -- least of all, me -- were surprised to find that I was a Primenet customer. On 12 March 2001, I received a message entitled, "IMPORTANT MESSAGE to our Primenet Dial-Up Customers". According to the message, I was to be migrated to EarthLink, the national lowest-common-denominator ISP, in the very near future. Since I wasn't and never had been a Primenet customer, I posted an inquiry to the local frontiernet.general newsgroup. I received a reply from someone on the system administration staff, who told me that I would be taken off the migration list. I guess I should follow my own advice to never take Usenet seriously, even in local newsgroups. I started receiving "Welcome to EarthLink!" literature, which I thought it safe to throw into the trash. But on 3 May 2001, my account was deactivated. It took several calls to technical support, billing, and customer service before I was finally able to talk to the right person. This particular customer service supervisor told me that she and her staff were also confused about how certain people were picked for this migration, and how others weren't. No one had communicated this process clearly to her, and while she was polite, she clearly found it frustrating. My problem was solved by moving my name from the national billing system to the local billing system. Apparently, Global Crossing was selling Frontiernet accounts but billing them under its own billing system, while "local" accounts sold by Frontier Telephone of Rochester were being billed by Frontier. It was just one ISP, but two billing systems. Problem solved, I thought. But my long-time loyalty to my favorite local ISP (even after I left Rochester) had been erased. In June, Global Crossing completed the sale of Frontier Communications to Citizens Communications. Meanwhile, Frontiernet still suffered from some increasingly aggravating problems. * E-mail delivery was becoming increasingly slow. It wasn't unusual to see a 3-4 hour delay between hops in the "Received" headers, clearly showing that a Frontiernet SMTP server was at fault. * Usenet news was losing articles. While not the centerpiece of my ISP experience, many users complained bitterly that posts were missing, often in multi-part binary postings to alt.binaries.* newsgroups. * Frontiernet was allegedly working on a means to bill customers for extra blocks of disk space, but such a system never materialized. This had been promised for over a year and a half, and the strain on my account's disk quota was becoming exasperating. The turning point came on 6 August 2001, when I received an e-mail message that brought back nightmares of the botched EarthLink migration. The message informed me that as of 3 September 2001, my e-mail address would change from gpratt@frontiernet.net to gpratt@globalcrossing.net. Apparently, Global Crossing would be keeping all the hardware that ran the AIX-based Frontiernet systems, but lost the right to use the "Frontiernet" name for the ISP customers it was keeping. Those staying with Frontier would retain the frontiernet.net domain name, but would be migrated onto new equipment. It would, I was told, be relatively transparent to the user. If I was going to change my e-mail address, I reasoned, it should be because I'm changing ISPs. After researching Panix, I decided to go with them, and began migrating all my files over here. This past Monday, I made it official when I told all my friends about my new e-mail address. The following day, I told the folks remaining in frontiernet.general that I would be leaving by the end of September. I followed this up with some e-mail to all the admins I knew, thanking them for their assistance at various times over the past four years. (Most of them are good people; it's Frontiernet's management that has their heads stuck somewhere I wouldn't want to go.) I received one message back from someone inside Frontiernet, whom I used to work with when we were both in college together. According to this contact, Citizens Communications "...is building their own Linux/NT systems to move their Frontiernet users onto [...] if you think bending under the perpetual [denial-of-service] mail load is bad, wait till you see what happens to them." Timing, I guess, is everything. I really do feel blessed. -- Gregory Pratt gp@panix.com East Rutherford, NJ, USA http://www.panix.com/~gp/ PGP Key Fingerprint: EDFF 64BC 52F6 E2A1 681A 169B 953C C12F 5B26 BA18