As many of you know, I do hosting for web, mail and various other internet services. For the last three years or so, I've leased a cabinet from Infinity Internet in a colocation facility in downtown Portland. I chose them because they offered by far the best rates for the services I required.

Anyway, a few months ago I noticed my bandwidth had become pretty drastically reduced (a download from kernel.org that previously came down at 2-3MB/s now comes down at 100-200Kb/s). They have been expanding (doubling the number of cabinets in the colocation) so I wrote it off as growing pains and figured it would shake itself out sooner or later.

Recently, however I became more concerned as I have acquired a customer who is hosting a VOIP server in my cabinet. He's had some jitter and dropouts on his calls so in an attempt to help him isolate where the problem is, I started investigating my bandwidth issues a bit deeper. After talking to a couple techs at Infinity, one of them reveals to me that my port is capped at 5Mbps. This sounds pretty low to me, so I inform him that my contract specifies 2000GB/month transfer. "Oh, that's 5Mbps" he assures me. Well, I figure, what has happened is they've finally tightened down on their bandwidth usage, but this is too low for serious hosting (congestion will be a noticeable issue, especially for the VOIP guy), so I go ahead and call one of the sales people to see what it's going to cost to get myself up around 10Mbps. Turns out my bill will just around double. The salesman informs me that I've been getting a "sweet deal" that they don't offer any more and in fact he's surprised no one has contacted me to try to renegotiate my contract.

I'm surprised too.

Anyway, I decide I should shop around and compare rates to see if Infinity remains the best deal in town. The problem is that my 2000GB/month of transfer isn't a option most facilities offer, so I turn to a bandwidth calculator to give me a more reasonable comparison. Interestingly, it turns out that 5Mbps is not 2000GB/month. 6.1Mbps is the absolute minimum. Mildly annoyed, I call the tech at Infinity and inform him of my discovery. 6Mbps isn't super hot either, but it's a 16% difference which is significant and I figure it will help until I work out a permanent deal (either with Infinity or somewhere else). The tech informs me there's nothing he can do, but he can refer me to someone who can help. That person turns out to be Infinity's other salesperson. I inform her of my issue, asking only that I have my bandwidth capped at 6Mbps rather than 5Mbps. She tells me she'll check and call me back. About an hour later she calls me back and informs me they won't change it. I'm a bit taken aback, as I didn't think my request was that outrageous. I really had expected her to tell me "no problem, we'll take care of it." Once my initial shock wore off, I ask her if this means they were going to void my contract, so I'd be free to shop around. "No." she informs me. I ask her how she expects to violate my contract and at the same time expect me to uphold my end of it. "Well," she explains, "the contract allows for us to change our rates at any time." I consider this for a moment and then ask her "without notifying me?" "Yes." she asserts.

I hang up and decide I'd better dig up my contract. These sound like pretty untenable claims. I have doubts about whether such a collection of terms would even amount to a contract in Oregon courts (but I'm not a lawyer, etc).

Anyway I find my contract, and low and behold, not only does it explicitly require that they give 60 days written notice prior to any changes to it, it also has attached the service order which states that I'm entitled to 2000GB/Month burstable to 10Mbps. Translated, this means 6Mbps burstable to 10Mbps. What they have been giving me for the last few months is 5Mbps non-burstable.

I'm making attempts to move higher up the management chain at Infinity, but quite frankly, after the shoddy way I've been treated I don't think I'll remain there under any circumstances.

My friend Josh just got FIOS (4/2Mb) and sent me his download times from a fast Gentoo mirror that's pretty close by (University of Oregon). His times were decent but not astounding:

Length: 20,403,483 (19M), 18,994,870 (18M) remaining [application/x-gzip]
78% [++++++===============================================================>                  ] 16,057,678   628.63K/s    ETA 00:07

Not too bad but not amazing if you're used to Comcast cable. His upstream is really nice, getting around 190KB/s. This is for around $35/month.

Anyway, I decided to test my Comcast cable on the same file from the same mirror:

Length: 20403483 (19M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: `emacs-21.4a.tar.gz.2'
92% [====================================>   ] 18,951,374   3.29M/s  eta 0s

Hot damn. I was pretty surprised. I'd seen speeds of around 1.5MB/s coming from my own colocated servers but never this high. Apparently Comcast has increased our speeds again (we noticed a speed jump after we got Comcast digital voice). We pay around $110/month (that's for internet, two digital phone lines and basic cable TV).

Anyway, we've been under a deluge of advertisements from Qwest claiming that Comcast jacks rates (I've had near the same rate from them for several years, even AT&T/@home cost around the same before Comcast bought them). Of course anyone with half a brain knows that Comcast offers an introductory price of $15/month for basic cable and that after six months it goes to the normal price of around $50/month. It really irks me when companies are so blatantly misleading as Qwest is in this case.

My major points of complaint would be:

1. Implying that Qwest DSL is remotely in the same category as Comcast Cable. Judging from my test today I must be getting close to 30Mb/s compared to Qwest's 1.5Mb. This is for around $15 more a month. Even the 5Mbit basic package Comcast offers is far superior to Qwest's offerings.
2. Comcast hasn't changed rates in years. They did cap bandwidth for a while but it was still easily twice as fast as a comparably priced DSL package (and more reliable to boot, I think I've had two outages in 5+ years).
3. Comcast actually wants your business. We run our own business and have struggled with the ups and downs of finances for a while. Comcast has never shut off our service even if we were a couple months late. You can pay in a couple weeks? Not a problem. A friend of mine finished college and was looking for a job and decided to cancel her Comcast account because she was trying to cut expenses. The Comcast rep asked her how long she thought it might be until she might be able to afford service again. My friend told her probably at least three months. They gave her three months of free service to carry her over. The chances of Qwest (or Verizon for that matter) doing that are about nil.

4) Qwest sells your information to telemarkers. When I got Comcast digital voice, two days after getting the new lines (with new numbers) I got a telemarketing call. They knew my name, so I was pretty pissed. I assumed that Comcast had sold my name and number. I pressed the rep until he admitted that Qwest had sold it to them. Apparently even though I buy digital voice from Comcast, that line still has to go through Qwest's network at some point which requires that Comcast notify Qwest of new accounts which Qwest then quickly sells for a couple bucks. This isn't the first time they've done this to me: long ago I had a Qwest land-line and pumping telemarketers who called usually revealed that Qwest had sold them my information. To add insult to injury, Qwest then tries to sell its own customers a service to block telemarketers. Talk about milking both ends of the cow. That's Qwest's "spirit of service". They should just shorten their slogan to "bend over".

I should also mention Verizon at this point. I saw an ad for them last night (on Comcast cable, ironically) taking pretty much the same stance as Qwest: omg, it's cable, run away! What got me with them is they labeled themselves as "a company you can trust". Huh? Is this the Twilight Zone or is this not the same Verizon that just sold all their customer's call histories (and anyone who called someone on their network) to the NSA a few months ago? When they showed all those people following their customers around in their commercials I had no idea how firmly rooted in reality that was. Even if I had I wouldn't have realized those people are all from the FBI and NSA.

Anyway, this whole thing has been rubbing me wrong for some time, so I just had to get it off my chest. Don't buy from Qwest, don't buy from Verizon. If you want to be treated like a person and get your money's worth, buy Comcast.

BTW, here's my full disclosure: I have never worked for any of the aforementioned companies nor do I plan to. So there.