|
Dear Perigee Customers:
Thousands of small entrepreneurial companies like Perigee.net came into being in the mid 1990's to bring America to the Internet. These innovative companies helped to develop and enhance most of the features you know today.
Neither Windstream nor any of the other local telcos had any substantial role in this innovation explosion. It was small, independent, entrepreneurs that got customers to try and use this new service. By 2000, in fact, an estimated 9335 companies were in business. More to the point, none of the phone companies were even in the Top 10 of US Internet Service Providers.
Most important: Over 50% of the US was using these small companies, NOT the big ones.
"54.2 percent of American's accessing the Internet and the World Wide Web do so through thousands of independent ISPs scattered across the country, which totals some 77.5 million subscribers nationwide."
The ISPs drove the US Internet economic engine, selling computers, servers, modems, and new services. They even helped the other phone companies sell millions of second lines. And all of this was a direct result of small independent companies, not the big companies.
Everyone should be outraged that the FCC has allowed the destruction of an entire industry. Three out of four ISP's were out of business by 2005.
We understand that some companies deserve to be put out of business because of bad business practices or actually go belly up because of fair competition. However, it is the anti-competitive behavior of the telcos that has put the independent ISP's out of business. We have many documented cases of Windstream switching customers without their consent, orders not going through and wholesale rates that are higher than the retail rates offered to their customers.
We apologize to our customers who have experienced a service interruption. Unfortunately, our main phone lines went offline yesterday along with a circuit that provided access to many of our customers. It is only a matter of time before the remaining DSL customers are shut down. If we had anticipated this action we would have notified you in advance. We met with Windstream last Fall and agreed to let them take over the Internet access accounts. We agreed to work together to transition the DSL access portion of our business to them and thought we were on track until yesterday.
In the long run, the best and most viable option these days to avoid working with a large, monopolistic company for Internet access is a local, fixed wireless provider. At this point, however, the most expedient way to restore your ability to get online would be to contact the telephone company for your phone service (Windstream or AT&T) and bundle services with them since this only requires a re-provisioning of your DSL circuit. We are investigating other alternatives and will release more information shortly.
Note that these necessary changes only affect Perigee customers that used DSL to get online. All other services related to email, DNS and website hosting will continue to operate as normal.
Let me repeat this because it may be confusing, once you are online, you can access any other services with Perigee such as mail and web functions. You do not have to change nor will you lose your email address. You may leave your email configuration alone and you will get any email waiting for you. You will need to gain access to the Internet to get to those services.
Below are several contact numbers for the phone and cable companies if you wish to switch to them, which I highly recommend doing for customers in Windstream territory. For customers in AT&T coverage we will have another alternative and will be reaching out to customers very soon.
Windstream: 866-971-9463
Timewarner Cable: 877-566-4892
AT&T Residential: 800-288-2020
AT&T Business: 888-944-0447
You can reach us via 704-951-7511 as we were unable to keep our old numbers unfortunately, We wish you the best in all of your future Internet endeavors.
The Perigee Staff
|
