Well, first of all, I signed up with Netcom.com when I first got out of college. Ah, those were the days, right? I had Ethernet in my dorm room (it was a nerdy school), and unlimited access 25*7. Life was good. But I had to sign up with some ISP before I left so I could "Stay connected."

So, I chose Netcom since they were up-and-coming. They had POP's in different parts of California, and since I wasn't quite employed yet, I didn't know where [in CA] I would be moving to. Netcom seemed like a wise choice, and at the time, they only had about 5 machines (netcom 1, netcom2, and so on).

Well, before you know it, they were up to netcom19.netcom.com, which means they had a whole lot more machines to serve me. Uh, not quite. They had a whole lot more machines to serve a whole lot of people, now in different parts of the country. But unfortunately, as AOL subscribers have come to find out the very hard way, national service does not come without a major pain in your hind quarters.

Anyway, after the service at Netcom went from lousy to unacceptable (including repeatedly being dropped off of their poorly-configured phone switches, and getting V.34 modem connections at 16,800 bps about 40% of the time, among other things), I just had to switch. I wanted a local ISP with an eye on the local customer base, NOT on getting customers from Canada and Europe...

Best.com seemed to be what I was looking for. I mean, I drove up to their store-front office (with glass windows so I could see the employees busily doing, uh, something) and signed up for service in minutes. They had real PPP connections (I had to use SLiRP on netcom), and I could register my own domain! I wanted to do this to avoid the "I have a new email address..." hassel when I changed jobs or, as would happen, ISP's again. But that comes later.

So anyway, I started noticing that connecting was getting difficult (you know there's a problem when you hear the PacBell operator recording on your modem telling you to hang up and try your call again...) and the latency of the connection, even when connected from work on T1-or-better lines, was getting just silly. At some point, I started getting disconnected for no reason, and tech support would repeatedly tell me that my modem was configured incorrectly. Uh, yeah. That works the first time, but not the fourth or fifth.

Anyway, there were TWO-- count 'em-- TWO straws that broke my camel in half. First of all, they moved the San Jose POP without telling anyone ahead of time (unless you actually read their internal best.status news group, which was littered with info on their sometimes-daily machine crashes and apologies for crappy service, billing problems, and so on) so that my attempts to dial in greeted me again with a PacBell recording, this time telling me the number had changed. Hmmmm.

Even better, though, was when my email messages started not making it. I glanced at best.status, or one of those internal groups they had, and saw that someone had lost some very important email messages on a day that I am pretty sure I lost some as well (his from the US somewhere, mine from Germany), and worst.com, er, best.com's tech support weenies blamed interconnections or the source or the weather or sun spots or... ending with a sarcastic comment about that user possibly being the one to blame.

So, basically, best.com has fallen victim to the same disease that AOL and Netcom are afflicted with. Much as our US Banking system does, these services rely completely on people not using their accounts. When a "managable number" of people are exercising their accounts, there is no problem, but if there is ever a surge (banks would call this a panic), well, failure is bound to happen. Best.com was posting error reports as fast as you could read them. Overselling, plain and simple.

So, thoughtful reader, my words of advice to you are these: If you want real service, support, performance, and at the very least a pleasant internet experience, try to find an ISP that believes in breaking even and being online, NOT on getting as many subscribers as possible to pay for the facade. Area.com is owned by four people who run it out of a garage, and they have enough accounts to pay for the network connection and maintenance. If you can't find one of these... well, find a few friends and start your own! You'd be amazed at how simple it is to get better-than-28.8 performance if you are willing to invest some time and energy (and money...).