Covad SUCKS!

Alex Pilosov alex at pilosoft.com
Wed Feb 28 23:07:44 UTC 2001


On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:

<rant snipped>

> This is a blind message. I don't even know if it's getting out of my mail
> hub. Theoretically, it should. You won't be able to reply. I can route out,
> but nothing can get back in.
That's strange. As far as I know, TCP requires a two-way handshake. :)

> 130 IP addrs, on a /27 <heh>. We talked earlier about how non-portable
> addresses suck. Here is the reason why. I either use one of their SafetyNet
Portable address wouldn't help you, since safetynet'd ISP won't talk BGP
to you. What you could do is (with agreement of your current ISP who owns
the IPs) is to go into any colo centers, put up your hardware, and tell
the colo ISP to advertise your netblocks.

> would have been able to avoid the outage. (BTW, my ISDN backup feed is dead
> as well). I've tried contacting Covad, thier executive staff, etc. No joy
> there, Covad doesn't care.
Its going from "We don't care, we don't have to" to "We don't care, we
can't afford to". Covad (and its wholesalers) experienced major collection
problems, and they are cutting off the wholesalers who don't pay their
bills. 

> 100% of MHSC business is directly dependent on our Internet feed. 100% of
> February revenue is gone. I had two product roll-outs that were scheduled
DSL is not supposed to be bet-the-business-on product. I'm sure it'll
sound silly now, but if you have 80k$ revenue, you could afford a T1 which
has very different ETR timelines compared to DSL, and that does not
involve so many companies involved in its delivery/billing process. 

> for the following week. Both are now dead issues. MHSC does CA for some of
> it's customers, renumbering invalidates all those CAs. Every lead we were
> working is now gone, probably forever, and so are many existing customers.
I may misunderstand something, but if CA means 'X509 certificate
authority', why would it invalidate anything? CAs have CN, which is a
name, not IP address.

> I'm looking at probable business failure. MHSC could sue, but may not
> survive long enough to collect, even if we win. If MHSC survives this then
> "Damn, I good!"

> I urge everyone, do not;
> 1) Recommend Covad as a DSL provider
> 2) Become a Covad partner.
> 3) Remain on Covad service, find someone else (Rythyms sound good)
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/r/rthm.html, the financial situation of rhythms is
not much better than Covad or Northpoint. According their current cash
burn rate, they'll run out of cash sometime this year.

> Further, if you have any Covad stock ... sell it.
Too late, its around 2 dollars now.

> The simple reason is that Covad has shown themselves unworthy of trust. They
> will cut off service arbitrarily, without direct cause, without compansation
> or recourse, and without warning. This is NOT the sort of behavior desired
> from an outfit in charge of your key infrastructure.
You are missing something. Covad did not cut off the service to you. Covad
cut off the service to DSLnetworks. DSLnetworks was not paying bills, and
it is their (dslnetworks) fault that they didn't disclose their financial
situation earlier to their subscribers. 

> I hope that this comes to the attention of Covad and I hope that they don't
> like it! MHSC will also be filing complaints with the CA-PUC and everywhere
> else that we can. But, a four-year process will not help MHSC stay in
> business. MHSC is already preparing a Marketing Communication plan to get
> this story out. MHSC tried dealing with this peacfully and got ignored, by
> Covad. Covad needs to be shunned by the rest of the Internet community, as a
> bad net-citizen.
I'm in no way trying to apologise for Covad (they got what was coming to
them), but your problems could've been averted with a T1 or redundant
connections.

--
Alex Pilosov            | http://www.acecape.com/dsl
CTO - Acecape, Inc.     | AceDSL:The best ADSL in Bell Atlantic area
325 W 38 St. Suite 1005 | (Stealth Marketing Works! :)
New York, NY 10018      |









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