Reviews:
 ·Armstrong Zoom ..
| Bye This company bought out the ISP I worked for in 2000. No severance, nothing, just your fired along with 200 other people. I was a lead engineer for the ISP.
They took the dial-up customers, shut off all DSL customers and any other broadband, and moved any T1 and higher circuits. That was it, and they lost over 50% of those customers within 3 months.
I have no pitty for this evil company and am glad to see that they will never go anywhere. |
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| My experience was with them on the DSL side.
They claimed I would get up to 1.5mb down, but I ended up getting 768, and for the same price I was paying Verizon for 1.5mb. I had to end up paying the etf to get rid of them, and it was real hell to cancel too. |
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| reply to keyboard5684
If they bought the ISP in 2000, Earthlink should record a significant write down in goodwill for buying right before the telecom bust. Take a little consolation that Earthlink almost certainly lost $ on the deal.
I agree that Earthlink will never go anywhere. I am not aware of any value that they add. I think they keep customers who are reluctant to lose their email address by switching to another carrier. |
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 lovswr
join:2001-09-15
Smyrna, GA | That would be me. I still have my same mindspring email address since like '96. By the way, mindspring bought earthlink & then changed the name of the whole shebang (a la SBC sandwiches)...to Earthlink!
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lovswr = good hivswr = bad |
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| reply to keyboard5684
said by keyboard5684:This company bought out the ISP I worked for in 2000. No severance, nothing, just your fired along with 200 other people. I was a lead engineer for the ISP. They took the dial-up customers, shut off all DSL customers and any other broadband, and moved any T1 and higher circuits. That was it, and they lost over 50% of those customers within 3 months. I have no pitty for this evil company and am glad to see that they will never go anywhere. You didn't happen to work for OneMain.com, did you? That's who employed me, and I think the only reason I got severance was because I was already covered under a previous severance plan from another, earlier, drawn out round of layoffs.
I'm not sure what happened to our local DSL customers, but many of our dial-up customers bolted after the switchover. Not long after I was laid off, I was wearing my EarthLink shirt while shopping in Wal-Mart, and a lady approached me and asked if I worked for them. I said no, that I had worked for the local OneMain ISP that got shut down. She then explained that her service had gone to crap after EarthLink took over, and she really missed us. I thanked her and got at least a little satisfaction out of that conversation that we had all done a good job. |
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gigantePremium
join:2000-06-30
Anchorage, AK | reply to lovswr
Sky Dalton loves you. |
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| reply to lovswr
Ha! I thought I was the only one doing that. I got Mindspring when they bought out PSINet's Interramp dialup service. Mindspring was great, one of those really well run companies that rarely exist anymore. |
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| reply to lovswr
Actually it was a merger and they decided that Earthlink was a better name hence why they kept it. Charles Brewer left after 1 year as CEO and Sky took over...
Earthlink killed the 10 Core Values! |
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Reviews:
·Armstrong Zoom ..
| reply to ISurfTooMuch
OneMain bought Penncom (the ISP I worked for) about 2 months before Earthlink bought OneMain.
OneMain was a joke, they where a bunch of investors that just bought a bunch of ISPs before Earthlink could and then sold them all to Earthlink at a higher price that what they would have paid. That is all OneMain was, not an ISP, but a group of investors that bought then quickly sold the whole group to make massive amounts of money. (My non-disclosure is moot at this point, sue me)
Local DSL customers, according to how Earthlink did it, if they could be switched over to an ATM circuit that could be shot down to there data center then fine, if not, they were shut off period.
T1, DS3s, etc, can all be moved so that was not an issue.
That story is what I heard a lot. After the local ISP was part of the borg basically the service went to hell. Honestly this was partly because of different dial-up servers. For example, at that time we used Lucent portmasters and Earthlink was using something I cannot even remember, but larger concentration units. |
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| I think you were right in the investors' strategy, but I'm not sure how much money they actually made, since OneMain stock tanked right before EarthLink bought them. The way I understood it was that, once the stock went in the toilet, EarthLink swooped in and grabbed it. Of course, the top guys still might have made money off the deal. I was too far down the food chain to know.
My ISP (Internet Partners of America) was fortunately never integrated into the OneMain billing/user management system (Remember the utter POS that B.O.S.S. was?), so we were pretty much left alone until the end. It was a good ride, kind of rocky at times, but we had good people there, and we had fun while it lasted. |
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