 | How we rate ISPs Version 1.3 - updated 4/16/2003 | |
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- One to five star rating system
- Checklist of what an ISP is selling you
If they show a map and give directions how to get to the "office", that's a really good thing.
Download Alexa Internet
Even if the ISP is "legit", if the DNS is provided by some other firm, access will be slower and less reliable. Setting up DNS is one of the harder technical tasks for a System Administrator - outsourcing DNS can also be a sign that the ISP lacks adequately trained technical staff.
A deception that a few ISPs use is to buy up an expired domain name. It appears they've been in business for a number of years when it is only the domain name that has existed that long. Doing an Author: *@yourisp.net advanced Usenet search at Google can help sort out the real ISPs from the pretenders - if you consider being in business a long time to be important. (We do!)
- a Mission Statement or
- a Statement of Principles or
- a Concise description of the market the company serves?
While the document is a legal document, it should not be written as if it is a document meant to only be understood by an attorney. You'll want to read this document before you sign up - not necessarily on the first pass at looking at ISPs, but after you've narrowed the list to a few finalists.
Note that some ISPs will use a separate connection to the internet for their web server. By having a separate line just to service web traffic, or placing the web server in colocated space in another city, this can make the ISP appear FAST to the outside world, while the customers of the ISP crawl at a snail's pace.
IMPORTANT UPDATE - April 2003
Since writing this originally in 1998, the ISP business has undergone many changes. Almost all nationwide ISPs now use third parties to run and manage their modem pools. Since your dialup traffic no longer goes through the ISP's computer room, unless you are looking at a local ISP, web site speed is not a reliable indication of connection throughput - although a web site with very slow pages is still something to alert you that the ISP may be running on a shoestring budget or outdated equipment.
If your new ISP is willing to discard its valuable front page web space to earn $5/month in ad revenue, what does that tell you?
Some ISPs offer both SMTP/POP3 and Web-based email. IMAP is an emerging mail protocol that some ISPs support, since it permits you to review the email without downloading the message first.
Be aware that some of the low-cost ISPs just point you to a free web-based email service, and do not provide any email service of their own.
Not very many ISPs put this information on their web site - calling the ISP before you sign up and asking them to describe the limits on the size of email is an excellent way to test the ISPs responsiveness to your future problems and questions.
How much extra cost if you exceed the limit?
Be sure you understand what happens when your bandwidth reaches the limit. Does your web site get closed for the rest of the month? Does your web site get deleted? Are you automatically charged extra? Do you have to purchase "commercial" space at 5x the rate for the personal space?
If they advertise unlimited bandwidth, one of two things is true - They are not being truthful, or the web hosting service will collapse when some kid with his MP3 collection moves into the neighborhood.
This is probably our single biggest benchmark in the overall rating, and is very simple to do.
- Does the ISP have a news server?
- Does the ISP have a lot of customers? (General rule of thumb: the number of messages that show up in Google Advanced Search for one year roughly matches the number of customers the ISP has)
- What news groups do the customers participate in? (are they talking about hacking and pornography, or philosophy and classical literature?)
- Are the people at the ISP asking questions or answering them? (If you found an ISP where net experts hang out, that is a good sign - like the Restaurant with lots of cars in the parking lot)
- Has the ISP been around for a while?
One catch - if you can't get online, you won't be able to read how to get online. Online support is NOT a substitute for phone support
If you need to get that presentation to someone at work and email is down, you can't afford to wait for a callback "whenever".
Pay attention to what time zone the ISP's support is located in. If you're on the East Coast and the ISP is in California with 9-5 support hours, that means you won't be able to talk to someone before noon (and vice versa)
They generally don't have any ability to check the status of the ISP's equipment or access to the accounting system. They are basically there to answer very generic questions about how to configure software. Any thing more complex, or that requires access to the ISP's computers gets sent as an email to the ISP, which they read the next day (maybe).
Some ISPs use a mix - during normal hours, they answer their own calls - after hours, the phone rolls over to the outsourced technical support.
In general, an ISP's support
responsibility is to make sure the services you've
contracted for (a connection, email, newsgroups, web
space) are functioning correctly. Assisting you to setup
your connection the first time is also important, but you
are expected to have a working knowledge of the basics of
your computer. Helping you recover when a program you
installed trashes your Windows system, or helping you understand HTML tags is an
unrealistic expectation. It's a good idea if the ISP
makes that clear in the description of the support
provided, so there are fewer misunderstandings.
If you are paying for the phone call, there is no motivation for the ISP to answer your call quickly. That "bargain" nationwide ISP with a long-distance support number can become very expensive very quickly while you're waiting on hold for an hour.
If everything at the ISP is handled at one phone number, it is probably because there is only one person answering the phone
(or you will immediately be dumped into a voice mail maze, or both).Beware of phony status pages - ones that always say "All systems normal" when the ISP is in the middle of a week long outage (see: ibm.net)... Or the status page shows the history of outages, and the last outage was 5 months ago. (nobody is that good)
With the widespread adoption of ISPs using third party wholesale networks like Level(3), Qwest and uu.net, the connectivity of your ISP's computer room to the world is much less important than it was in 1998 (when this was first written). The closeness of the DNS servers to the POP and which network the POP is connected to are much more important, but also harder to measure.
For most ISPs, their connectivity only matters as it relates to sending and receiving email, and accessing your home pages on their web server.
As time permits, we intend to rewrite this entire document as a guide to how to identify the ISP which has the best wholesaler choices for you. In general, as of 2003, we consider Level(3) and Qwest to have the better wholesale networks, but that might change by the time you read this.
While the rest of this section may be interesting reading, unless you are evaluating a local-only ISP, this information is no longer all that helpful.
If they don't have digital connections into the phone company's central office, you won't connect with v.90 speeds. If the phone company C/O isn't digital - normally only in small phone co-ops or very rural areas - you won't get v.90 speeds no matter which ISP you choose.
In 2001, a new modem standard (v.92) was approved and started to appear. V.92 supports higher upload speeds, better compression, shortened connect times, and sharing one phone line between voice and data (by putting the computer connection "on hold" while you talk on the phone).
If the ISP offers fractional T1 and larger "Pipes" for business customers in their local area, they probably have a competent networking staff in house. Business accounts generate more revenue, but they also have higher expectations about the quality of service.
Go to http://www.multitrace.com/ or Traceroute.org. Trace the route from several "well-connected" locations to the ISP.
- Worldcom (alter.net,uu.net, wcom.net, bbnplanet.net)
- qwest.net
- Sprint
- Level3.net
- Cable and Wireless
- att.net (cerf.net, ibm.net)
Are the pings usually about the same? Big variations indicate a point of congestion. "Lost Packets" close to the ISP end of the trace are a major warning sign.
Quality ISPs use a diversity of
providers and are "multi-homed". That term means
that they have several gateways to the Internet - if one
network is broken or slow, traffic can be routed using another
network that is still working well.
If you really want to
test an ISP, call them up and ask "Are you multi-homed? Do you use BGP4? What is your ASN?".
You probably won't understand their answer, but you'll have their attention! :)
A peering arrangement is a contract between two parties setting out the terms under which they will handle each other's Internet traffic. (this is also called "transit") Much of the Internet's traffic is exchanged at one of the NAPs (Network Access Point) Mae East, Mae West, AADS, Sprint in NJ, and Pacbell in San Jose. These NAPs have become overloaded, and many of the larger ISPs have gone to private peering arrangements, where they have direct lines to each other. Just because an ISP has a connection to a NAP does NOT mean they have peering arrangements in place with the other folks at that NAP.
If you ISP doesn't have a good set of peering arrangements, your packets wander all over the internet trying to hitch a free ride to get to their destination - they may never find a path, or they may go in such a bizarre path that the connection is close to useless, no matter how big their pipe into the interconnection point is.
NSLookup for windows - an old (1995) but very functional window based NSLookup client
If the ISP has more than 2 DNS servers located in the domain, they are probably a serious operation and have a very capable technical staff.
Fast, local DNS can be more important than backbone speed for WWW browsing.
If the MX record points to another domain, the ISP has probably outsourced email to someone else, or is a reseller of the other ISP. If you have email problems or issues, there is a middleman in this arrangement.
Do any of the servers share the same IP address?
Sharing servers also leaves the ISP vulnerable to hacker attacks - if they penetrate the WWW server, and the ISP has stored the password file or credit card data on the same computer, you (the customer) now have a problem.
If you know you are dealing with a small ISP, and that's what you wanted, don't worry about this. If you thought the ISP is a huge multinational conglomerate that has 18 terabytes of bandwidth, they aren't.
AOL has trained most people to believe that they need a CD to get onto the internet, but that's not true. Since about 1997, Windows has been stable and has everything included that you need to use the internet and receive and send email.
Steering folks towards well-known and reliable software will also keep folks off the support lines and/or make it easy for the Level 1 support people to answer the questions, since they will be trained in that specific software.
Hosting the software on the ISP (if the ISP is not using a wholesale provider) takes extra work to maintain, but keeps the downloading traffic local to the ISP, saving upstream bandwidth costs and giving better performance
An ISP that views your use of the account to do things as a "problem" is short-term smart, long-term stupid.
Hosting a mirror of tucows consumes resources, but is a sign of the ISPs commitment to build the Internet, not just be a "net leech" hoping to make a quick buck and sell out in a year or two.
The setup fee will deter the folks who change ISPs more often than they change their underwear. Since most of the support expenses are involved in account setup, the setup fee helps keep costs down, and should either be reflected in a lower monthly charge or more features to the account.
- If the ISP has good Usenet, add $3
- For each extra email account (not email aliases) add $1/month per account (max: 5)
- For each MB of web/ftp space, add $1.00/month per MB (max: 5 MB)
- For each 100 MB of bandwidth per month for your web/ftp site, add $1/month
- If a Unix Shell account is included, add $5
- For each $5 of setup fee required, subtract $1
- If the account limits hours to 200 or less, subtract $.15 an hour for each hour under 200.
- If ISP is not local to you, and support is not toll-free, subtract $10/month.
If the account is more expensive than its "value", it's not a competitive rate structure. Note that price is directly related to competition. If you live in a town with only two ISPs, you're going to pay more than someone with 632 choices.
Note that if you have no use for some of the "included" features, while the ISP may be a good value to a "power user", it may not be a good value for you.
- charges for excess bandwidth
- automatic conversion of your account to a dedicated account if you use "excessive" time online
- Backend cancellation fees or excessive cancellation notice periods
- Noncontestable "Fines" for "misuse" of the service
- Charges for tech support beyond a certain number of days, or over a maximum number of minutes
- Tech support is actually a 900 service that you pay for by the minute
- Charges for sending you a bill
- Fees if your electronic payment "bounces"
- "Terms are subject to change without advance notice"
- No-refund policies on prepaid accounts
- Setup fees in the small print
- Will you be charged sales tax?
A growing trend is to offer you a large amount of web space (let's say 25 MB) and in the small print limit you to 50MB of bandwidth per month, with the "overage" charged in the range of $.10 to $4.50 per MB extra. (The going rate in bulk is less than $.005 per MB). First thing you know, Junior slapped a collection of MP3s on your web page, and you wind up with a bill for $1,000 in "overage" charges. Beware.
Another item to look for - if you have more than one person using the account and need a mailbox for each person that isn't shared, check the pricing carefully - some ISPs charge up to $15 to set up the 2nd email account, and up to $5 a month. This probably reflects the fact that a family that shares an account is likely to run up more hours per month online - rather than that the email account costs them that much to maintain.