Canmore's Blog

ISP Wars

In my hometown, there is no broadband internet access. So we formed a citizens' initiative and connected the whole town using 5Ghz WLAN equipment from Proxim. The ISP that provided us with the technical devices and the leased line is called net.art and resides in Bad Kreuznach. Everything works more or less fine, although we are using a 2MBit leased line to connect over 70 people (sic!). Yet, if one takes a closer look, the ISP seems incompetent. Very incompetent. I'd like to mention some sad facts about our net:

• No UPS is protecting the leased line and the so-called "Basic Station Unit (BSU)" that enables all clients to connect to the Internet.
• Our subnet is susceptible to ARP attacks. Since these attacks could even be accomplished by newbies using Windows, this is a great threat.
• Thee is no load-balancing / QoS used. This makes certain services such as VoIP telephony virtually impossible.
• It took the ISP 8 months to develop a traffic measuring program that yields more or less exact results (we all have volume-based internet access). Prior to that, they used SNMP to monitor the client's devices. So basically, everyone was billed for ARP requests that had nothing to do with surfing, too (sic!).
• Everyone is issued a static IP address, which is fine. But none of these addresses is paired with a hostname. Result: Reverse DNS doesn't work. Quoting from RFC 1912: Every Internet-reachable host should have a name. The consequences of this are becoming more and more obvious. Many services available on the Internet will not talk to you if you aren't correctly registered in the DNS.
• Smaller problems such as wrong invoices, missing contact information etc. tick me off.

So, what I am doing right now is bothering these guys until they give us what we need. After all, we are paying for certain services. Fortunately, there is a local that is responsible for our site. He is in touch with the ISP right now trying to solve connection problems for some clients. I confine myself to sending e-Mails mentioning our current status and my personal level of p*ssedness.

This is getting quite interesting. Let's see what happens in the next weeks...