I had an ISP come into my area in early 2000 and lay brand new fiber line. I have a 100mbit pipeline running into my house that feeds my cable TV, Phone and 15Mbit symmetric connection. Now... the phone and cable are each on their own line mind you.... I could pay an extra $100 a month and have my connection uncapped 100mbit up/down. Anyways, my ping rates are flat and flawless and I have 10 years of insanely awesome internet service.
Unfortunately, the ISP had gone bankrupt and the service was purchased by Surewest. Promptly, problems began.
First problem was all of the great 'offers' they kept calling, stopping by and mailing me about, attempting to get me to sign onto a new contract (so they don't have to honor my current one that was grandfathered over). Finally got them to stop that. Then came their attempt to bill me for my in home network I've setup. They replaced the cable boxes, saw the network and said, "You're not paying us the monthly network fee!" I politely informed them that this is my personal network that I administrate myself, they are not to touch my equipment and there is no network fee in my contract.
This seemed to have angered them, because after that I would lose connection to any game, movie, or any streaming content every 5 minutes. I called and complained for 2 weeks trying to get an answer as to why this was happening. Every time they would say, "It's your network causing the issues, you need to purchase our network package that we'll support and that'll fix the problem." I was livid and began to tear my own network apart looking for bad connections, checking IP assignments and refreshes and all the good stuff tyring to figure this out. No problems. I then ran a tracert and got the IP addresses of the switch the line comes in on, as well as the relay up the street. I would run pings to these servers. My computer to the router, fine. R My computer to switch... Fine. My computer to the relay was fine, except for every 5 minutes, it was not returning a ping. I noticed after this, the IP on my switch would change as well. Finally the problem was found out and I called back tech support and asked why they had a 5 minute refresh on my IP address... at this point they started getting defensive about 'dynamic ip's'. Finally, somehow I got a hole of someone who was apologetic, and turned my refresh back to something reasonable.
Needless to say, it's all because they don't like my contract and thought they could play the "It's a bunch of tubes!" line with me.
