| What's happened to AmericanISP I can neither be too charitable nor can I be too cruel about this. I think the following is a fair and balanced opinion. (The situation could even be worse than I know or am willing to delve into based on what I've heard.) They have been in slow implosion mode every day for almost three months straight, they have completely run out of excuses and they don't even bother defending themselves anymore. There has not been a single significant advance back toward normalcy in this entire time. I and perhaps a few thousand other customers who are still left have been suffering with this miserable situation ever since. They have become a shadow of their former selves.
AmericanISP has simply made some extremely boneheaded mistakes over the last few months and has expertly put itself into a suicidal tailspin from a position of near invincibility, the stupidest mistake of all which was to set itself up for a failure by moving well before the DSL lines and other aspects of their network were completed at the new location. They left no room for overlap, and no room whatsoever for contingencies. Piss poor strategy.
To use a ship's analogy, they were a very thickly-clad battleship captained by a 'damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead' attitude, and they managed to be hit by every last 'nuclear torpedo' that came at them, and have been near totaled into scrap iron.
Prior to the 'move' in August to Downtown Denver, AmericanISP was easily the top-rated local ISP in the Denver area in many people's opinion. It's service was pretty near flawless, and severe problems were pretty rare, like in the once-per-year, once-per-two-years range.
Ever since their very ill-planned move to downtown Denver, they no longer provide DSL service (only dialup), and they have very frequent, very serious problems with all sorts of things. Initially, they blamed all their problems on Qwest, but it turns out Qwest wasn't to blame whatsoever, not in the beginning and now now, and not ever. It was just a vain ruse meant to forestall the inevitable truth coming out.
Lately there have been severe issues with e-mail.
They somehow caught a virus last week (how does an ISP catch a virus?) which caused them to have to shut off their spam filter and flood their customers inboxes with many tons of spam. (I went from getting about 10/day to over 150/day on a few days and over 60 per day on a few other days. Then their e-mail went down for almost a day starting early this morning, with the warning that it may be down for 48 hours. Fortunately, it came up after being down ONLY 12 hours or so, but I have little faith it will stay up before something else happens.
Where these problems were rarities before, they have become way too commonplace. It seems everyday it's some kind of bad news or other on their voicemail.
I really fear for this company's survival.
They were the largest local ISP and were actively purchasing other smaller ISPs, but now it's beginning to look like the entire ship is sinking rapidly.
I'd say the next few weeks are basically its last chance to turn things around before they take the final deep six.
If you're considering this ISP, I'd advise waiting at least a few months (2004) until they can make up their minds whether they want to right themselves or terminate themselves, which I have little doubt about the latter.
If they are going to recover, it should be with existing customers, not new ones they can use as a money treadmill until they burn out from the bad service and leave. Right now, very few of the existing customers are real happy about any aspect of their service, and it's not any surprise as to why. It plainly sucks real bad. Frankly, I'm on the bitter, raw edge of leaving myself and I really don't give a damn if they see this or not. They brought this on themselves. Bad companies don't deserve to survive indefinitely. This ISP is becoming a severely injured racehorse that may need to be put asleep. |
