Wiznet

[Kristofer Coward]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 07:49:16PM -0400, Ralph Doncaster wrote:
> Dave and especially Adam are crooks; according to my lawyer they violated
> the bankruptcy act but the trustee isn't willing to investigate it unless
> I pay (for the investigation).  Even though it's criminal the police don't
> seem interested (the potential criminal liability is "only" a few
> thousand).  Of the close to $2 million owed to creditors by DSL.ca and
> Velocet we were owed over $30K.
> 
> I checked out their web site and their prices are way above market; for
> the $69/mth they want for a 3.5M/PPPoE service we give our customers a
> non-PPPoE service.  If they have no bandwidth cap then that might explain
> the high prices.

As far as I can tell, current market prices for residential DSL (if not
also for business DSL) are too low to support the quality of customer
service that Velocet provided[0] (pre-Wiznet). Given the choice of
"screwing" their customers (through either higher prices, or through
poorer service), their employees, or their suppliers and creditors,
they appear to have opted to screw the latter.

This seems to have been largely a result some naivete with respect to
the willingness of some of their customers to screw them (esp. during
the .com crash) some hubris with respect to how much Linux/BSD use
lowered their costs, and the desire to be liked by their clients and
employees (because the clients pay the bills--well almost--, and high
employee morale makes their working life more enjoyable).

I was generally very satisfied with the quality of the service they
provided, and am somewhat inclined to look out more for my interests
than the interests of my ISP's suppliers and creditors. I also some
degree of hope that the slightly higher prices I'm seeing mean that
they aren't operating quite so crookedly now. I'm not saying I'd
necessarily loan them any money, or sell them anything on credit, but I
feel comfortable enough purchasing internet services from them.

0) eg. actually providing some degree of real Linux/Unix tech support
-- 
Kristofer Coward				http://unripe.melon.org/
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