I am not saying it is down 75% in absolute terms. 75% of the times I try to use it, which is on weekends and between 8 and 12pm weekdays. That is prime time, and the inherent weekness of having so many people share the same pipe becomes apparent.
To answer your questions:
1. It has been going on since I signed on in July 99. At first they tried sending people out to check the modem, but everyone soon realized that the modem works perfectly, it has ALWAYS been a network problem.
2. They have not once had an estimate of when the problem would be fixed. Not once has support ever been able to even tell me anymore than "yeah, your node is down" or "yeah, I can't connect to your modem". One time, the guy almost got mad at me because HIS complete support system was down, he couldn't check anything. Now, it has pretty much been reduced to waiting for DSL. I don't even bother to do my daily support calls anymore, because it is always the same answer. Basically, I just logon with Netzero and check back later. I even wrote a JAVA program that I could run as a daemon which would log to a database whenever the system went up and down. It is too much of a pain and hogs system resources so I don't use it.
3. I think the service is relatively new but I am not sure.
4. Area wide in what terms? From what I can tell it is at least city wide. When I used to talk to the support guys every day, they would sometimes ask me if I was in specific areas. If it is reliable in most places with only some trouble spots, WHY DON'T THEY FIX THE PROBLEM! My area is affluent, professional populus which is prime target for broadband.
I remember stories when cable modems were first introduced in California about system downtime and speeds slower than 28K during prime times and now I know first hand.
OOOOPs! Just went down again for second time today, will have to logon on to Netzero to finish note.
OK. hopefully I will be still loggen on to SI. Here goes.
Nope. had to shutdown. here goes again.
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