As someone who had a less than pleasant split from iinet, I thought this article in an online media website was interesting. Iinet described my personal situation as an MTU problem ... after labouring for 2 months with their blink system I pulled the pin and asked them to buy the modem back, they refused simply saying if they did it for me, they'd have to do it for everyone. They also argued because there were moments when the system worked, they had provided an adequate service. Anyway, enough of my carping! A web savvy Canberra IT person writes: "Over the past few months many small businesses in Canberra been unwilling participants in a stuff-up where Perth-based IINET, the stockmarket darling, took over a local ISP called webone. IINET has gone from a price of $1 to $3 over the past year. This has been achieved by increasing the number of subscribers it has to its ISP service. It has achieved this by buying other smaller ISP's. It probably buys customers for $50 to $100. If you have 10,000 customers and you are an ISP then you can probably sell your business for $500,000+. This strategy is not a bad one for IINET if they can keep their customers (or even a few of them). When you buy an ISP get rid of all the staff and service your new customers with your existing staff then it makes sense. Buy a customer for $50 and if you have no increase in support costs then you get your money back in a couple of months so it is not bad if it works. However, you have to question the strategy when you look at the experience of webone customers. Here is a quote from a newsletter sent out by a rival ISP in Canberra just last week. "Things have been very busy here in the office over the last few weeks. As many of you would know, one of our competitors was taken over by a large national ISP who has since closed down the Canberra office and terminated the employment of all the Canberra staff. I am very glad to welcome the many hundreds of customers who have since left them and joined us. I am also glad to say that we were able to employ some of their staff who are now a welcome part of the xxxxx team". When IINET took over, webone customers were told very little - just that things would be the same as usual. Things were OK for awhile but then things got really bad. IINET decided to get rid of the web hosting business and just concentrate on the easy bits of billing customers for connections. In the changeover they managed to lose websites for up to a week. That is, customer's websites disappeared because someone somewhere messed up what are called routing tables so that domains became invisible. Emails "disappeared" and then reappeared. You would suddenly get a flood of emails when a queue of mail was found again. Even last week we were still experiencing problems. Try to call someone and you would get the annoying message that "your call is important to us but everyone is busy" and then you sit on the phone for an hour or more - this has been going on for weeks. It becomes very difficult to run a web-based business when your ISP lets you down. In our own case our business has lost at least two full weeks of development effort trying to trace difficulties and placate customers. It becomes very difficult to explain to customers that their transactions are failing because they will blame you and you can only say "it is beyond our control" only so many times. It is not very convincing because your customers believe - quite rightly - that it should be in your control and you should not have chosen an ISP that allowed itself to be taken over without adequately protecting its customers. Unfortunately it is difficult to change ISPs if you rely on email and you use their domain name. You have to notify all your customers of your new email address and you are uncertain about the next ISP you go to anyway - especially when this is the second or third time you have been sold. As a customer who was sold I blame the seller just as much as the buyer. If you sell customers for a profit then you have a responsibility to make sure your sale does not disadvantage your customers who made your sale possible. If sellers do not do this then perhaps as customers who are being sold we should have some recourse against the seller. IINET may keep enough webone customers to make the whole exercise worthwhile but you have to wonder. If this is the way they have integrated their other acquisitions then their $3 share price looks suspect. "not happy jan"
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