How Smart is My ISP?

Hopefully very much so. No Internet relation is more important. Here are a few ways you can figure out just how smart your ISP is.

What web hosting software is my ISP running?

Get It Try It

Fire up Spike's 'Head' function to see what web hosting software your ISP is running. What you want to see is that they're smart enough to be running Apache. What you don't want to see is that they're dumb enough to be running Microsoft IIS.

You want to see them running Apache because it's by far the most dependable and reliable system on the planet. You don't want to have to pay your ISP for services when these services are down for repairs all the time. You also want to see them using Apache because it's a clue to how smart they are.

Write them letters

Ask for support help. Make it sound good. And then just sit back and wait with a stop watch in one hand.

A good ISP will immediately send you an automated reply acknowledging receipt of your inquiry and a personal and helpful response within 24 hours. A poor ISP will not send an automated reply and/or not reply for days on end. A very bad ISP will not send a reply at all.

Call them

On the phone. In the middle of the night. A good ISP will answer the phone. A good ISP has 24/7 service. A poor ISP has service only during office hours and never on weekends. A bad ISP has an answering service on almost all the time or is largely inaccessible because the line is always busy. You should always be able to get through to your ISP and quickly too, no matter what the time of day or day week month of the year.

The Internet never sleeps and never goes on holiday. Your ISP should not either.

See how they handle inquiries

Do you get to work with the same support personnel throughout your inquiry, or does your inquiry get tossed around from desk to desk? They're wasting their own time and yours if they can't reveal their complete names and offer direct email addresses for you to complete your inquiry. Bad ISPs will have support personnel who won't even sign their letters and will address them to 'Dear Subscriber' or some other such rot - 'semi-automated' letters: worse than nothing at all.

Trace away

Use Spike to trace your way to a number of well known Internet sites such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Hotmail, et al. Note the number of hops needed to arrive. Note which backbones you have to jump into (this is rather advanced actually). Note any bottlenecks. Use Hawkeye to see how 'healthy' the Internet is with your current connection and compare your results with those of friends using other ISPs.

It's also important to see how close you are to the 'real backbone'. The way it works is some companies such as UU provide the real bandwidth, drawing their own cable all over the place, under the oceans etc., and other companies contract for some of this bandwidth. But these companies will in general also rent out bandwidth to further companies, and so on. If you're on the Alter/UU backbone you're doing good. If you're on another you might run into problems. The trick here is to see how many hops it takes to get out onto the 'real highway' - the fewer the hops there are, the better.

Try FTP

Some otherwise decent ISPs are notoriously bad when it comes to FTP, so do give FTP a good test.

Dial-up problems?

There shouldn't be. If you get a busy signal your ISP is no good. They should have enough open lines to handle all connections at all times.

A lot of ISPs overload their modem pools too. They figure... well, it doesn't matter. Make sure your connection is fast 24/7 - if it's not, look around for a new provider.