Have any of you noticed that over the last year Mindspring/Earthlink has gotten awful? Multiple disconnects, bad connections etc--anyone else experiencing this?

-- disgruntled user (disgruntle@disgruntle.com), February 21, 2000

Answers

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

You can go to the website and look at the current status of the problems. http://www.earthlink.net and then look around for status.

-- mommacarestx (mommacarestx@mail.com), February 21, 2000.

Yup,gets worse by the day, considering U.S.West dot net, locally folks are happy with them, seems Earthlink has gone to hell in a bucket....can anyone give a plus or minus for uswest.net?

-- Roger (pecosrog@earthlink.net), February 21, 2000.

I have Mindspring service (formerly Netcom). WWW access is really slow. I have been using my local freenet and Freewwweb for web access.

-- Dave (dannco@hotmail.com), February 21, 2000.

I'm running thru Mindspring's Atlanta node -- haven't had any problems at all, barring occasional slow access to a URL during peak traffic hours. I've encountered no down time- but I'm not on all day either.

I imagine the merger with Earthlink, now officially finalized, is still in the debugging stage.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), February 21, 2000.

I am still waiting for comments on Juno. Planning to switch over from AOL.

-- canthappen (n@ysayer.com), February 22, 2000.

Why don't people support their local ISP's instead of putting money in the pockets of people who don't live in your community, therefore your money does NOT stay in your community. Plus the service is a gazillion times better! Shop local!

-- Sheri (wncy2k@nccn.net), February 22, 2000.

Canthappen:

I've put up my experiences with Juno, but I'll do it again for your benefit.

I signed up for their free ISP service, answered their mandatory long survey, and ended up getting rid of the service.

You see, I can ignore the 2 big ads that they put up when you start up the program, and I can ignore the banner ad that is always up (you can't take it off, lest you terminate the program).

I can't ignore the fact that the banner ad covers up nearly the entire toolbar in Internet Explorer, and that the program is rendered nearly useless. No favorites, no back or forward button, no refresh button, no history, etc.

You can't talk to a live human being at Juno unless you are willing to pay $1.95/Minute. Their help files aren't very helpful, and they never answered the email I sent to the "President's Office".

At least with Microsoft, you pay $35 per incident, regardless of how long it takes to resolve (I was on there 2 hours once for 1 problem, and only paid the $35), whereas on Juno for 2 hours, it'd have cost nearly $240. What a ripoff.

I'm sorry to hear that MindSpring/Earthlink isn't doing so well.

-- Bill (billclo@blazenet.net), February 22, 2000.

This is interesting and helpful information. I have been on a local ISP for two years and sometimes I think I should go with a big name national brand. But my ISP hasn't had any problems of the scale you mention, they are cheap, they are 3 miles down the road and they offer free internet classes. I think I'll stay where I am.

-- (nemesis@awol.com), February 22, 2000.

I "shop" locally with my provider and have used the same one for 2 1/2 years and am very please - hardly ever get kicked off and mail has only been down once since I started. Buy local!

-- Laurane (familyties@rttinc.com), February 22, 2000.

I've used Internet America (the 1-800-be a geek company) for several years, and was always happy with the service. Since late November, maybe early December, I get thrown off the system all the time. Sometimes I've kept track, and my auto-reconnect tries to reconnect every two minutes!! For hours at a time. Sometimes, I have to reconnect every minute. Othertimes, it just shows "unable to establish a connection" for several times, and then connects. This happens very early morning, late evening, middle of the day - makes no difference when. Other times, I can work for hours without a disconnect. Makes me crazy (sorry, crazier!)

-- Kathy (kathyp@airmail.net), February 22, 2000.

Kathy, same with us on EarthLink. It used to be so good!

The "new" EarthLink Personal Start Page is a big rotten step backwards. Blech! No way to customize colors is terrible. The current boilerplate is garish. The mess of links in the first space cannot be hidden. The page takes way too long to load. It's ugly. The features cannot be customized as well as they used to, and are full of ads and visual clutter. Personal Start Page is missing some really important features. This new Start Page is vastly inferior to the previous one. Why did EarthLink take out Apple News which used to be at the top of the News column? That was a great feature!

The new page is going backwards into some kind of low B horror flick PC nightmare underbelly.

How ironic that the very day Apple announces their $$MMillions into EarthLink, EarthLink screws Mac users :-P

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), February 22, 2000.

I got rid of MS last summer when their service became IMO unreliable. I understand its worse now. I tried a local ISP, not much better. Switched to Freewwweb. Perfectly satisfied. and its free:-)

-- Free (mls@freewwweb.com), February 22, 2000.

My $.02 ...

Yep, shop the local providers ... but also do a little research on your phone companies...

Are you in an area where the phone service is bad? If it is, like some of the Bell South service areas, your ISPs won't be all that wonderful, and it really won't be their fault -- you just can't use high speed data modems with older telco equipment.

If that's the case, you might look into one of the internet/cable services, like Road Runner, which doesn't use the phone lines. I think RR is too expensive for my needs (something like $40/mo around here), but that may be worth your consideration.

Do check your yellow pages and ask for a "free trial" or cut-rates for a month from the locals. Many local services are anxious to sign up new customers and often run specials.

Good luck!

-- (ladybuckeye_59@yahoo.com), February 22, 2000.

When we lived in Portland, OR, we used a local, filtered service which was good and we could connect at 44,000bps. However, since moving to the country in CA last May, we've had nothing but problems. We tried a local ISP, then Mindspring, then Earthlink, now Compuserve. Our fastest connect speed is 28,800, probably due to phone lines. We're not satisfied with CS, but found that we can connect much easier at peak times by using a feww ISP at bluelight.com. We have to put up with the banner on the bottom, but it isn't to bad if we use Microsoft IE and click on full screen. It beats waiting for 45+ dial-ins for connection with CS. The next option is DSL or ISDN since we can't do anything about upgrading the phone lines. Anyone else have a better suggestion ?

-- Kenin Marble (kenin17@yahoo.com), February 22, 2000.

I am OK with Earthlink. I have several icons on my desktop, each with a differenct local dial-up number. Usually the one I usually use works OK, but occasionally I have to use one or another of the other ones to get a good connection.

I don't know about access speed, since I have only a 33.6K modem -- haven't upgraded to 56K yet.

Their start page crap -- dump it -- it's there only so all the old AOLers will feel at home. You can use ANY web page in the world -- from the internet or from your own hard drive (a page you've created or copied and modified) as your start page. You can, for example, make the top page of this forum your start page. Or the kitco page. Or something like http://www.ceoexpress.com/

Learn to organize and use your bookmarks (or "favorites" as Microsucks calls them, assuming you can easily organize them in IE).

-- A (A@AisA.com), February 23, 2000.