A couple of days ago, I reported this. PCCW did not pull thru, so this morning, I placed an order for So-Net Broadband service. There is no guarantee So-Net would pull thru either, as they only support residential installation, but they said they would come and try to install and no charges if they failed.
The reason I decided to switch to broadband in the office after all these years is that in the past two weeks, my modem has been extremely slow. I thought it was the ISP’s modem pool problem as both IE and Firefox were slow.
This afternoon, while updating my Avant Browser, I found Registry Medic listed on their site. I decided to give it a try. The unregistered version only fixes 5 problems each scan, so I went on kept rescanning until all problems were fixed.
What do you know, that for some reason cured the modem problem! And the problem was simply virtually no data passing thru the modem. Everything else ran fine before the fix without slower than the usual speed.
Disclaimer: I am not exactly sure what I was doing with Registry Medic. I ran it as a last attempt to fix any unseen problem and was going to reinstall windows entirely if anything went wrong. So, make sure you know what could be deleted in the registry before you do any fixing with it.
The residential vs. business line thing is to a large extent artificial segmentation of the market, althou I don’t doubt that business broadband users get a better service in the deal, but then the majority of the business users probably don’t care too much. Residential BB from PCCW in a commercial unit is also not unheard of. As for So-Net I suspect they would rather take your money than let your money go somewhere else, so I expect the setup to be relatively smooth.
You are also beginning to sound like Jerry Pournelle http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ in his old Chaos Manor in the Byte Magazine.
That PCCW plan was a Businuss BB plan, except their flyer which was not being circulated in the public and only for the “special” customers expired the end of May but like most other plans it was extended for a few more days. Only that I was just a couple of days too late in hearing about it; or the sales was just pulling my leg. The time limit differentiating Businuess BB and Home BB was perfectly fine with me and I wasn’t asking for more than what they were willing to provide.
However, it would seems that PCCW couldn’t care less whether I’d continue to stay with them or not. But I concur with your speculation that So-Net would try their best to provide me with their service than to let it go to some other ISP.
For better or for worse, there is no way I’d pay over $200 for any BB plan for a mere 80 hours or so monthly personal access. Worse comes to worse, now that the modem access seems to be back to its normal speed, I’ll just keep using that.
I am not aware of Jerry so I’m not too familier with his style in just a short read. If it meant an old man’s talk, I’d admit I am there quite some time ago.
Jerry used to talk a lot in his old column about how he got his many computers and software combinations to work together. He was knowledgeable and resourceful, but Murphy striked every single time. It was fun in the beginning, but became painfully tiring after a few years.
Resources should be used to solve real problems, not artificial inherited problems of a tool platform.
Ah yes, I see whatu mean…
I don’t like to hide the weaknesses of my tools.