[Leaplist] Brighthouse or Embarq?

[Jesse Goerz]

On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 18:35 -0500, John Simpson wrote:
> On 2007-12-12, at 1403, John Simpson wrote:
> >
> > i'm using brighthouse right now- they do offer higher bandwidth than  
> > DSL, and you can call for customer or technical support 24/7. my  
> > only complaint with them is that they don't announce maintenance  
> > activities to their customers. they just cut the service off for ten  
> > minutes to four hours in the middle of the night with no warning,  
> > and for somebody like me who works from home at night, that's a  
> > major interruption (it literally shuts me down for the night.) i  
> > think if they were to set up a mailing list to announce maintenance  
> > activities, it would help a lot- at least if i KNEW that the service  
> > would be down on a certain night, i wouldn't promise to do mail  
> > server upgrades for clients in other parts of the world and then not  
> > be able to do them.
> 
> time to add to this. the brighthouse connection was "down" from about  
> 3.15am until 10am this morning. i have the word "down" in quotes  
> because while it was happening, i was able to ping and traceroute  
> anything on the internet by IP address, but i was not able to resolve  
> DNS names (talking directly to the thirteen root servers, not  
> brighthouse's DNS servers) and i was not able to connect to any TCP  
> ports on any servers at all- even the ones i had just pinged.
> 
> when i filled out their contact form to ask what had happened, their  
> answer was "We apologize, but we are unable to provide the information  
> that you have requested regarding the outage that occurred this  
> morning. We are sorry that we can not provide this information."
> 
> to me, this sounds like a filtering system which allowed ICMP but  
> blocked UDP and TCP for some reason... like maybe they're recording  
> the traffic, or logging the endpoints (i.e. keeping lists of what web  
> pages you look at, who you exchange email with, who you talk to via IM  
> programs, and so forth) and that server ran out of hard drive space.  
> or that server was in the process of being installed and was mis- 
> configured for a while...
> 
> i've emailed them back, explaining that this is the only conclusion i  
> can thing of which fits the facts (ICMP worked but UDP and TCP didn't,  
> and their outright refusal to provide ANY details) and offering them a  
> choice to either explain what really happened, or to be added to the  
> list of "suspicious" ISPs, who monitor and log their users' traffic.
> 
> i guess we'll see what happens, but as of this morning i wouldn't  
> recommend brighthouse to anybody who values their privacy.

I had the same problems (I have brighthouse).  I wasn't as savvy and
just figured my recurring "line noise" problem was at it again.
However, the person I talked to at customer support didn't run through
the normal checklist at all and just gave up really quickly.  It
wouldn't surprise me one bit if they were logging everything.  After
all, it's just marketing analysis.

Jesse
p.s.  please share if you find anything out.