Does anybody use Earthlink? If so, is it good or is it bad?AOL comes to mind as one of the bad ones. I got an add in the mail for a free printer and a scanner. Not like I need either one but what the heck.
This belongs in IMHO.
bibliophage
moderator, GQ
I switched from AOL to Earthlink and I have no complaints. Then again, I think the issue for me was that I was friggin’ sick of AOL. I went with Earthlink for the free (albeit hella-cheap) digital camera.
Earthlink is an ISP. AOL is an “Online Community”. Go with an ISP, anyone will do, as far as I can tell.
Earthlink is operated by Scientologists. If you don’t mind allowing Scientologists unfettered access to your private email, then by all means go for it. I wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole.
If you do decide to go with Earthlink, absolutely do NOT install their software. It includes a user tracking mechanism called “supercookies.” It allows anyone, anywhere on the net, to see what web pages you’ve browsed. Here’s the best explanation I know of, although it comes to the totally unfounded conclusion that these supercookies are harmless.
http://grc.com/su/earthlink.htm
Note that if you click on the “click here to see what google finds” link that it lists a whole bunch of referrer pages. Essentially this is a list of pages this account browsed. This doesn’t look so benign to me. Steve Gibson is an idiot.
If you use Earthlink, set it up manually in your OS, don’t use their browser and software installer.
Then again, Gibson is a Publicity Whore, and not very well regarded by many in the technological community. He will do and say whatever is necessary to cause a stir and to get noticed. He’s also quite psycho.
I’ve used Earthlink for the last several years, and although I’ve gotten Roadrunner, we still have the dialup account. IMHO, it’s the best ISP out there (Unless you got a good local one).
Cite? I know this isn’t GD, but my God does that look like pure claptrap to me.
Ignoring Chas. E’s alarmism, I would agree with Jack Batty. Go with an ISP over something like AOL anyday. I have AOL and it sucks.
Earthlink has been my ISP for nearly two years now, and I have no complaints. The only times I’ve had trouble connecting with anything online was while using ICQ, and I tend to think ICQ rather than Earthlink is to blame for that.
Their free and optional Spaminator spam-filter service kicks ass.
Their rates recently went up two dollars, and is now $21.95 a month (I think). (I believe you can pre-pay for a year of service and get the $19.95/mo. rate.) Since I’m online roughly 10-12 hours per day every day, it has worked out to be quite a bargain to me. YMMV.
Scientologists don’t bother me unless they’re stalking me or pounding on my front door. And since I prefer to configure my own software, I avoided the tracking bit that Chas E. linked to. If those are Earthlink’s only cons, then IMO the service is one of the best ISP deals on the planet.
And since Chas E. brought it up, here’s Earthlink’s privacy policy.
Because I take issue with his implication that the evil Scientologists at Earthlink might do horrible, improper things to my e-mail account, I have e-mailed them asking under what circumstances they would access and/or monitor a user’s e-mail account. I don’t expect I’ll hear anything any other ISP wouldn’t tell me. I’ll post their response as soon as I receive it.
Here’s just one example of the business practices of the Scientologist Earthlink Founders:
And more to the point:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/scientology/history/Scien149.html
BTW, I especially loved that Earthlink Privacy Policy. It basically says they will share your personal data with any marketing company they feel like (more spam, and junk mail, yay!) and they list a set of “special cases” where they say they’ll do basically anything they want, if they can rationalize it as “to protect Earthlink.”
I’m an Earthlink subscriber, though not really by choice. I’d been a Mindspring customer for years when Earthlink and Mindspring merged. I was quite happy with Mindspring and felt good about being a customer of a company that was very committed to its core values.
When the Earthlink-Mindspring merger came about, I knew about Sky Dayton’s Scientology links, and it bothered me, but when I investigated my options there didn’t seem to be a better choice available to me, especially for DSL access. If anything, the situation’s worse now, since so many of the companies providing DSL access have tanked. Earthlink’s customer service is markedly worse than in Mindspring days, we’ve had DSL access problems from either my work or home frequently over the last few weeks, and for a whole raft of reasons I’d love to change, but by the same token, who else can I go to that offers DSL service in Atlanta with a nationwide network of dialup POPs, and who isn’t likely to be out of business tomorrow? BellSouth?
I don’t think it’s just Earthlink DSL. I think it’s DSL implementations everywhere, as all of my friends with DSL have had countless service outages, delays, etc.
I’d switch to cable, if possible.
Well, I’ve had reports from neighbors and friends with cable modems in the area that they’ve had serious problems as well (some have switched from cable to DSL and found it more reliable, at least for them). My impression, also, has been that however Earthlink may have degraded Mindspring’s customer service, it can’t be as bad as the trying to get service from a cable company – particularly AT&T Broadband. The biggest problem is that we don’t have cable – not just that we don’t subscribe, but that the cable coming into the house was physically removed years ago, when the former residents set up one of the big satellite dishes in the back yard. So in addition to the extra monthly expense for cable TV (we wouldn’t subscribe otherwise, having only one 13" TV in the whole house), we’d have to pay for installation of wiring as well as the standard installation charges. Hardly seems worth it.
I’ve been an ELN subscriber for over five years, and their service has been generally top rate.
Last year I switched from dial-up to DSL service, and although Earthlink’s service was acceptable, my experience with PacBell was nothing but frustration after maddening frustration. And Pac Bell has absolutely no customer service for its DSL service. You are expected to talk to the ISP. It’s the most bass-ackwards and enraging arrangement I’ve ever seen. If Earthlink hadn’t assigned a “troubleshooter” to my account, I never would have got my DSL installed. As it was, it took three months, and Earthlink had to give me one of their DSL modems. I’ve still never received the DSL modem that PacBell was supposed to send.
But once I got it up and running, the DSL has been extremely reliable, and even though I’m paying for 768k download rates, I consistently get twice that.
Earthlink’s technical support and customer service have always been exceptional. Earthlink broadband customer service had some growing pains, and is a completely different business group so it has noticeable differences from the dialup side, but they’ve worked out the kinks and it’s just as good nowadays. I don’t understand rackensack’s crticism, unless Mindspring’s customer service was even better.
And it’s your local phone company that is mostly responsible for the reliability of your DSL service. The part that the ISP handles is mature and well-emplaced, though it’s not infallible either.
Cable vs. DSL is a question that can only be answered by comparing the phone and cable companies in your specific area. And there are other factors, too, like your proximity to phone company equipment, the number of people sharing your bandwidth on cable, static vs. dynamic IPs, port blocking, web page serving, etc.
Well, on the admittedly rare occasions when I had to deal with Mindspring’s customer service folks (I’ve been responsible for multiple business accounts with them through the years, as well as my personal account), I typically got through quickly, got my question answered promptly, and had someone on the other end of the phone who seemed committed to helping solve whatever problem I might have. With EarthLink, the hold times for customer service have been much longer, the quality of the answers lower, and the experience less pleasant in general. YMMV, of course.
As an example, I rarely had to worry about having dial-up access outside the Atlanta area until I changed jobs recently. On one of my first trips on the new job, I wanted to check my personal e-mail from the hotel. I’d downloaded the list of all Earthlink POPs before leaving, so I didn’t anticipate any problems – change the number and all’s groovy, right? Wrong. Apparently, the authentication servers behave differently depending on whether the POP in question was formerly a Mindspring POP or not. I tried several times to call Earthlink to figure out what I needed to change, but the hold times were at least 30 minutes no matter when I called, no one responded from their “online chat” feature during the day while I had high-speed access from an office building, and it took three days for my e-mail requesting assistance to get any reply other than the autoresponder (that’s three business days, not weekend days – early Tuesday to early Friday). I’d figured it out on my own just by playing with the settings long before I got any action from Earthlink.
One of my colleagues here in Atlanta also has Earthlink DSL service, and has experienced, on more than one occasion, waits of weeks rather than days or hours for answers to issues he’s raised with them.
I’m familiar with the issues involved in delivering DSL service; I was product manager for an early DSL product for the apartment/condo market that never saw the light of day. I shouldn’t have lumped the recent access problems in as one of the factors in my minor annoyance with Earthlink. But how they handle the customer relations issues that offering DSL service entails is something you can lay at their doorstep, and they haven’t been doing a very good job in that area recently (at least not for Atlanta customers).
You don’t have to subscribe for the TV service. You can just stick with the Cable Broadband and leave it at that.
In my experience, basic Earthlink dialup is good, their tech support is pretty nice, but for the love of all that is creamy and delicious stay AWAY from Earthlink DSL.
I could type the story of the nine months of EL DSL aggravation and credit card fraud we’ve gone through, but my fingers would fall off.
I’ve never used AOL, but I don’t like Earthlink as much as my previous local ISP. There browser is just as annoying as hell, hyperlinks are the wrong color half the time, it crashes frequently, there’s an Earthlink toolbar in the middle of the screen that can’t be moved and sometimes pops up on top of the browser even if you specifically tell it not to, and when you get a pop-up ad, all your other windows get minimized.
I have used Bell South’s DSL service for about 6 months now and I can attest that they are pretty good. I had to deal with outtages the first week or two and the software installation took me about 4 hours, but other than that I’ve stayed online for days and days without end. I really don’t know if the upload/download speeds are as fast as advertised, but at their worst they beat the hell out of my old 56k modem which is all that matters.
I live in Knoxville, TN btw.
Yeah, but they usually charge you $10 more a month if you don’t get TV service, and basic cable is only $12 a month. So you might as well get it.
Hey Chas E., do you work for AOL? There is no concept of right to privacy when using AOL products.
My advice to all: don’t use any of the browsers Earthlink, AOL, or any ISP, offers you. Learn to build a dial-up profile on your own. I have ELN, after using Mindspring. It is alright with me.
mr. blackwell, where under blue heaven do you get cable for $12 per month???
Earthlink dial-up subscriber here. I’ve had them for about five months and no complaints yet. I bought their service through a Sprint/USAA plan, so I pay about $15 a month for it. I also use my own browser and set up my Web site with them, and the few times I’ve had questions, I got through to their customer service and had no problems.
In fact, the last time I couldn’t log in, it wasn’t because of Earthlink, it was because the fiber-optic cable in a Baltimore train tunnel melted due to a derailment. Gives you some idea how fragile the Internet is when the loss of one major connection can cause massive traffic delays up and down the East Coast.