 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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 | | | Re: Bye 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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| | | 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 | Re: Bye 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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| | | gigantePremium
join:2000-06-30
Anchorage, AK | Re: Bye Sky Dalton loves you. | |
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| | | | | 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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| | | | | 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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| | | 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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| | Reviews:
·Armstrong Zoom ..
| Re: Bye 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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| | | | | Re: Bye 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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 MattAll noise, no signal.Premium
join:2003-07-20
Jamestown, NC
kudos:12 |  Good for them
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 DogfatherPremium
join:2007-12-26
Laguna Hills, CA
1 edit | Gov't should reverse course on line sharing Since Verizon gets to tear up public property to plant their money tree, they should have to line share. | |
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|  Shack
join:2002-01-17
Bloomington, IN | Re: Gov't should reverse course on line sharing Agreed | |
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| | | Or they could invest in/encourage build outs of muni-fiber with open access in smaller cities that are being skipped by the telcos. | |
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| | patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
kudos:1 | Re: Gov't should reverse course on line sharing said by tad2020:Or they could invest in/encourage build outs of muni-fiber with open access in smaller cities that are being skipped by the telcos. Yep, be a UTOPIA ISP.
Its hard to find what Earthlink is good at, or can specialize/value added features in. Offer dial up modem bonding maybe? Make a FON clone? myspace/facebook/social networking profile development/consulting  ? | |
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| | | | | Re: Gov't should reverse course on line sharing Their my ISP via TWC. It nice cause their $5 less than TWC for internet only.
Last year when TWC finally did a network upgrade, uVerse was coming and they only offered 5/300, and I got boosted up to 8/800, but since January I'm back to 5/300. My boss lives in the next city over (but its the same CO) and his speeds have been affected similarly but he bought service directly from TWC after the upgrades happened. My guess is that TWC felt no threat from uVerse after all and they redacted the network upgrades. | |
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|  jester121Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL | Re: I personally do not care how much they make or loses I agree with everything you said, except the part I didn't understand. | |
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| |  GooberPremium
join:2000-12-17
Naperville, IL
kudos:4 | Re: I personally do not care how much they make or loses There were parts that you did?
I've got a stuffy head froma cold right now and the post just gave me a headache. | |
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| | | jester121Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL | Re: I personally do not care how much they make or loses Just the first three paragraphs were confusing. | |
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| | | | GooberPremium
join:2000-12-17
Naperville, IL
kudos:4 | Re: I personally do not care how much they make or loses Really? I didn't get the last paragraph either. Must be my stuffy head . . . | |
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| | | | | jester121Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL | Re: I personally do not care how much they make or loses Oh my bad, I guess there were 4 paragraphs total. Didn't understand that one either. | |
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| | | | | | GooberPremium
join:2000-12-17
Naperville, IL
kudos:4 | Re: I personally do not care how much they make or loses I think I'm seeing things. There are only 3 paragraphs like you originally said. I think I'm hallucinating the 4th.
Whatever, he's got me completely off at this point. That and my sniffles and bleary eyes.
I think the summary is, "Earthlink be damned." | |
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| | Resell EVDO they can take up reselling Sprint's EVDO network like Slingshot does. Maybe they should call DSL Extreme and get into the DSL game again. | |
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 DrStrangeTechnically feasiblePremium
join:2001-07-23
West Hartford, CT
kudos:1
 ·Sunset Net
·Stephouse Networks
| offshore tech support: you get what you pay for Earthlink lost me as a customer when they botched a hardware migration on my DSL line [forced hardware migration from AT&T to Covad splitters at my CO]. Since I run a small computer services business, I waited patiently for 3 or 4 weeks for them to figure out what they did [after politely explaining it multiple times to the Indian tier 1, 2 and 3 tech support folks]. After Earthlink wasted a ton of money sending a new modem I didn't need and scheduling two AT&T truck rolls to my premises, they declared the line TNF.
I switched ISPs to another Covad partner and they had the [same] line up and running at twice the speed of the Earthlink connection within a week. This ISP has tech support here in the US. The one issue I've had with them was resolved within three hours [in the middle of the night]. I got a call from the owner of the ISP who figured out the problem and fixed it personally.
Earthlink would be in much better shape if they'd hire even a handful of knowledgeable US-based techs to deal with the small percentage of problems that the offshore support people can't [or are told not to] understand. Now that they're turning a profit, they should invest it in creating these jobs to help themselves and the country. | |
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| hrobinsPremium
join:2000-10-15
Regina, SK | Re: do you think? Fatness, pardon the pun, fat chance for that. When I worked there back around 2000, they called for a team meeting and announced that all dailup support was going to be outsourced. We told the manager that the outsources were not that good and they would cost customers. We were told by the VP of Earthlink, to not say a bad word about the outsourcers. They knew the service sucked, but didn't care it was all about making money.
*The above statement is my views, and my views only, and should be taken as such.
Sorry for the bad English, its 2am here and I haven't been able to sleep for about 26 hours. * | |
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me1212
join:2008-11-20
Pleasant Hill, MO | What is broadband over powerline? I read that they invested in it in the article, and wondered what is it? | |
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| | | Re: What is broadband over powerline? try google bpl | |
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 TMMerlinThe Devil made me do it
join:2003-06-19
Oxford, MI | Oh Goodie As long as Earthlink still stays in business ..I can keep connecting to Mindspring.com and get my email ...LOL LOL | |
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 Simba7
join:2003-03-24
Billings, MT
1 edit | How many more years will EarthLink survive? This is one of the bizarre questions. It seems like these ISPs (including AOL) just won't die.
No matter how much the economy has gone to crap, no matter how outdated dialup is, they still lurk around.
I was with OneMain.com for awhile, before that they were MCN here in Montana. They were *GOOD* for an ISP.
..then came EarthLink.. and as usual, it went to sh*t.
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Bresnan 15M/1M|Mine[P4HT 3.2GHz,2GB RAM,2x1TB HDDs,WinXP]|Wife's[P4 2.4GHz,1GB RAM,60GB HDD,WinXP]|Router[2xP3@1GHz,640MB RAM,18GB HDD,Allied Telesyn AT-2560FX,Kingston KNE100TX,2xDigital DE504,Compaq NC3131,iPro/1000DP,Blitz BWI715,Gentoo] | |
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| Reviews:
·Comcast
 ·Comcast Digital ..
| Re: How many more years will EarthLink survive? At this point, I hope they don't die. They still employ hundreds of people who need those paychecks to take care of their families.
Months ago, I would be screaming "Die, EarthLink, Die!" as a former employee and customer of EarthLink's. Now the landscape has changed and I hope they make it through these tough times.
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Satan is always busy. He makes bad things look good and good things look bad! Watch that Devil. | |
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| | hrobinsPremium
join:2000-10-15
Regina, SK | Re: How many more years will EarthLink survive? Fatmanskinny, last I heard there wasn't that many people left at HQ. You remember the noc at the old mindspring building? They fired most of the noc staff and outsourced that, they have outsourced just about everything they can. | |
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| | | Reviews:
·Comcast
·Comcast Digital ..
| Re: How many more years will EarthLink survive? Wait, how do outsource a NOC? I thought most of their systems are within the old NOC building down the street on Peachtree Street, no?
I know quite a few guys from the NOC are gone but I didn't know they just about completely dismantled it.
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Satan is always busy. He makes bad things look good and good things look bad! Watch that Devil. | |
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| | | | hrobinsPremium
join:2000-10-15
Regina, SK | Re: How many more years will EarthLink survive? Yea most of the systems were at the old Mindspring building, a friend of mine that did some contract work for Earthlink told me that they outsourced it. They may have the equipment, but the actuall support people don't work for Earthlink. Don't ask me how or why. | |
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| | | AOL would be dead if not for the stupid that "can't lose my aol email addy" and "the Internet is AOL." People love AOL to keep for chatting. | |
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| | NOC - OUT
However everyone feels the hurt when anyone looses a job. I hope all of us have one. | |
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I personally do not care how much they make or loses
