>> But The Real WTF(tm) is
>> - ...my company USED THIS PRODUCT for 5 years???
>>
>> As in, my company used a RESIDENTIAL INTERNET ACCESS PACKAGE to 
>> present their corporate presence to the Internet? o_O
> 
> I would venture to say that they probably didn't know if the Internet 
> was going to be important or not, and went with the cheapest hook-up 
> available.  While it may seem stupid for someone in a Western business 
> concern not to have known, in 1998, that the Internet was definitely 
> going to be important, any observer of the American automobile industry 
> will aver that management can be guilty of graver stupidities than that.

What perplexes me more is that a few months later, they hired a company 
to design and host a website for us - and we continued using AOL home 

on the design and hosting of a dedicated website, but not important 
enough to go with a real ISP?

Suddenly I'm understanding the vast profusion of dialup modems I threw 
away last week!

Of course, after that an "ISP" opened for business on the same business 
park as the guys I work for, and we went with them.

They were never terrifically reliable. I'd quite often have to walk 
across the lawn and knock on their door to ask why something or other 
wasn't working. (Typically we had no Internet access at all - which, 
back in those days, just meant we couldn't send or receive email.)

One day, I went over to ask why our connection was down, and discovered...

...that the entire building was empty. And by "empty", I mean there were 
no desks, no chairs, no filling cabinets, no plants, just a deserted 
building. (!!!) When I eventually obtained the keys to the building from 
site management, I discovered that some potential new tennants had been 
taking a look round and had unplugged the network hub that powers our 
building.

[The visitors understandably didn't realise that the equipment in this 
deserted building *does*, in fact, still need to be running. Hell, why 
would you think that though? You get a call from a business park 
inviting you to have a look round a vacant building, and find that some 
other company's critical infrastructure is run from that building... GO 
FIGURE!]

About a month *after* this, we got a letter from the ISP telling us that 
they don't do ISP work now; they just do consultancy. Gee, thank you SO 
MUCH for telling us!

When I had a look at their infrastructure [which, obviously, I'd never 
been allowed near before], I discovered that the wireless transmitter in 
our building connects to a similar one in their building. But whereas 
ours is mounted on the wall, theirs was inside a Tupperware box that 
someone had crudely gouged some holes into using a pair of scissors to 
allow the wires through.

(ARE YOU READING THIS?? We paid several thousand pounds per year for 
THIS level of professionalism!)

The box was sitting in the loft space, and the power and network cables 
trail out under a moved ceiling tile. The power cord was at this point 
holding an extension cord off the ground. The network cable vanished 
into a tangle of Cat5 around two 3com 48-port switches, went through a 
Sonicwall firewall, and then vanished into an underground fiber optic 
link to the switch room in the main park reception area.

When you get to the main switch room, you discover something a bit more 
professional-looking. And it turns out our "ISP" was actually just 
leasing an Internet pipe from a company called Network-I. So we became a 
direct customer of Network-I, to keep our existing system working.

(It appears they're still going:  http://www.network-i.net/  )

Anyway, I don't know what Network-I actually "do". Certainly they seemed 
to be far more professional than the clowns who had just deserted us. 
But they were giving us 0.5 Mbit/sec of bandwidth for quite a steep 

brand new fiber link.

BT told us they could install a new link for nothing, and it would be 
direct to our building (rather than going through the switch room and 
then through our old ISP's deserted building). They told us the link 
could be active in 21 days [which seemed a little surprising considering 
it involves digging up roads].

We signed up. Nothing happened for a while. You see, "BT" is not 
*actually* BT any more. The people we spoke to were "BT local business" 
- which is actually "Crystal Communications", a nobody company that won 
the right to put "BT" on their vans. They operate on behalf of BT, but 
they're a seperate, unrelated company. In particular, they have nothing 
to do with the actual service. They're just salesmen.

After many days of frantic calling, I eventually managed to get hold of 
the *real* people - the ones who actually know about laying cables and 
assigning IP addresses and so forth. Actual network engineers. Things 
went much better after that...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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