Cray's Tech Journal: PeoplePC

Today I thought I'd talk about my experience with PeoplePC's dial-up internet service. I happened to have had a customer back at the beginning of the year who bought PeoplePC service. He was a first time internet user. He had just paid around $1500 for a Dell XPS as his first computer, and asked a friend what internet service he should get. His friend led him wrong, and told him to go with PeoplePC because it was cheap. Like a true wide-eyed and naive internet newbie, he signed on for a full year contract right away, and a few weeks in, he called me out there to figure out some of his computer issues, namely his getting kicked offline constantly.
At the time, my only contact with PeoplePC was seeing their odd commercials. When I saw the kind of setup they had, my first instinct was to ditch their proprietary dialing software and use DUN, but it turns out he was paying extra for the "accelerated" (glorified proxy server that decreases image quality to decrease load time), so I didn't have the heart to tell him it was bunk.
In addition to the frequent disconnects, I noticed a serious lack of performance for a two week old dual-core performance beast. After playing with the processes a bit, sure enough, it was PeoplePC's dialer that was hosing his performance. If you're not familiar with their dialer, or as they call it, the "Smart Dialer", it has a hacked Internet Explorer window that you must keep open the entire duration of your connection. If you close it, it disconnects from the internet. Well, isn't that completely useless?
As I was fiddling with the settings on the "Smart Dialer" trying to find a setting that would stop it from disconnecting so often, I came across his list of phone numbers in the "Smart Dialer". One was local, one was EAS, and the other three were local toll! As it turns out, these are the numbers PeoplePC had given him to use in the "Smart Dialer" when he called their support number... their 1-900 support number. No, I did not stutter. Their support is via a 1-900 number. Anyway, they had primed the "Smart Dialer" with these numbers, and wouldn't you know it, the dialer liked to dial one of the local toll numbers best. Therefore, every time he connected to the internet, he was getting charged about $0.10 per minute by the phone company. As you can see, this is no "Smart" dialer. It is simply a method by which PeoplePC controls their bandwidth, and it has nothing to do with optimizing anything for the user. They couldn't care less if you end up dialing long distance to connect to the internet. I was quick to disable all the numbers but the local one, and it connected just fine. It disconnected about 45 seconds later, but it did successfully connect. Then it crashed. Actually, it had crashed a few other times before, but I didn't feel like writing "It crashed" every other line, so from now on, just assume it crashes often. I gave him a heads up on the awful phone bill he was going to receive, and then continued with my exploration.
I failed to find any setting that seemed to improve connection stability, so I had to reach into the tech toolbag for a few tricks. In my pursuit of underhanded "stay alive" methods, I took a minute to read their terms of service to see what exactly was legal. It turns out that, as part of the terms, you agree that you will only connect to their service using the proprietary dialer provided, and not with DUN. I was becoming more and more impressed with how it seemed they were actually trying to be the worst ISP ever. I'm gonna have to give them the award. They've done so much to do so little.
Eventually I got everything to a workable state, but it was only designed for the short term. My customer, already conceding the money he'd paid to PeoplePC, had decided to choose a local ISP that actually works. So, in this particular case, PeoplePC makes out like a bandit because of their subpar service and shady business practices. They get paid without actually having to provide any service. Wow, that's a pretty effective business model.
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Big Cray: Accept No Substitute