As most of you know, I've been at odds with my Internet Service
Provider (ISP) since the company took over the cable franchise and ISP customers here.

A day after the new company took over, my ability to log into and use
the Telecom Digest server at M.I.T. vanished. It took about a week of
arguing with verying levels of yes-men at the ISP, and a call to the
North Carolina Governor's office, to get the new owners to lift the restrictions: kudos to Alex Rosen at Panix.com for his help getting me
set up with a VPN which obviated the problem while I waited for the
political wheel to grind.

Then, on September 4th, my Callcentric VoIP telephone line went dead,
along with my VoIP line to the Hamshack Hotline, which is a VoIP PBX
used by Ham Radio operators to talk about and work together on
emergency communications involving VoIP connections over Amateur Radio
links.

I tried several different "VPN" vendors, none of which made a
difference with the Callcentric or Hamshack Hotline VoIP numbers. Only
Panix, in New York, provided any solutions, but the others were long
on hope and short on results. I went round and round with tech support
at their service numbers, but I eventually realized that all their
advice was designed to keep me waiting until after the next bill was
paid, and so I dropped all of them except for Panix, which still
provides me with value for my money, although I haven't been able to
figure out how to use their VPN for anything but SSL links.

So, life went on, and I tried to interest various reporters in my
story. Last week, I made a comment on a Facebook group that is used
by other residents of the county I'm in, and I named the ISP owner and mentioned that my Callcentric lines was still out.

The next day, my Internet connection changed dramatically: the
Callcentric line came back, although Hamshack Hotline is still out,
and the other things I do on the Internet all became harder to use,
less reliable, and more and more erratic by the day.

The company that now owns the local cable franchise obviously pays for
a monitoring service which flagged their name and mine from the
Facebook post. Their kneejerk reaction was to stop blocking
Callcentric, but to take revenge for my criticism by sabotaging web,
email, and search access on my account.

So, I'm putting up with "web site can't be reached" and "site does not
exist" errors from my web browser, and with repeated failures when
Thunderbird starts up or when it tries to check my mailboxes at the
IMAP servers at Gmail, outlook, and iecc.com. I don't know what
mechanism they're using, but I'm in need of help with this more
obvious and more vicious method of discouaging public complaints,
because it seems to me to be the next step in an ever-more-arrogant
"pay and shut up" type of corporate mentality.

If you have, or know experts who have, expertise and/or equipment
which I can use to document the deliberate sabotage of the Internet
connection I use to write the Digest, please get in touch.

Bill Horne

--
Bill Horne
Moderator, The Telecom Digest
(Please remove QRM to use the from address)

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