Avvanta Communications

As a business owner, the 2006 outage was devastating and inexcusable, but I stuck with them until today. Companies that send email internationally use a text decoding call UTF-​8 (
). This allows these companies to send non-​standard text characters like Japanese symbols, Greek characters, etc. Avvanta web-​based mail does not decode the UTF-​8 so many of my email headers (subject and sender) just looks like garbage. I’ve complained for months and they refused to make a change to their web ap. The problem keeps getting worse as more and more companies — airlines, social websites (facebook, myspace, etc.), The Seattle Sounders — companies that send email to potentially international customers use UTF-​8. The final straw is that now that my family is sending me messages on the T-​Mobile (also an international company) phones is coming in garbled. They are pretty self-​righteous about the way other companies should be doing things and my family should reconfigure their email and they don’t have advertising… Big whoop-​tee-​doo. All the big guys handled UTF-​8 just fine and don’t cost $ 36/​year. I don’t want to be lectured on internet philosophy, just want to read my email.

I have been an Avvanta (formerly Blarg) customer since 2002.
CONS:
+ Inexcusable setup of their Bellevue office led to a 1 week outage during the Storm of 2006. While they now have their primary facility in the Westin, they showed extremely poor judgment in their setup prior to that. Also, they were impossible to get a hold of. I almost left them over that. They have forever lost 1 star for that.
+Service hours could be better.
PROS:
+Competitive pricing and it’s not MSN
+Great Web Hosting and Parking Solutions
+It just works (except as noted).
+Customer service is top notch when you get a hold of them.
+Can have servers setup with Pro Packages.
+Unmetered Service.
+In 8 years of service, only about 2 weeks of total unplanned down time isn’t bad, including the down time due to the 2006 storm.
+As mentioned above, Tech support is live, local and in English during office hours.
So, overall, I really recommend them as an alternative to Comcast and MSN. If you have fiber going up to your house, they can a fantastic alternative to Comcast.
Despite my not having Fiber, Stream Netflix works fairly well as does the gaming I do.

Today’s technobabble (
) review is about to begin.
Ready?
Here we go!
I’ve been using Avvanta (
) (formerly known as Blarg!(
)) as my ISP (
) since the good old days of Usenet (
), Pine (
) and Shell (
) accounts, right after the Internet (
) was invented by Al Gore (
), and before the GUI-​based (
) World Wide Web, as we know it today (
), existed). They’ve been super duper outstanding, having an uptime (
) which would make any Six Sigma (
) expounding outfits green with envy. 99.9%+ (
), in my non-​Xcientific (
) estimation. The only real outage during the bajillion (
) years I’ve been with them is the Great Storm of 2006 (
), which took out everything on the grid (
).
When it comes to Tech Support (
), I’ve always managed to reach a live English-​speaking person, or when I’ve had to leave v-​mail (
) or e-​mail (
), the response time has been well within their SLA (
). It’s obvious that they don’t offshore (
) any services and I very much doubt they play the H-​1 game (
). And just for the record, I’m not saying all these good things because they’d know all my deepest darkest secrets (
) if they’ve been sniffing my packets (
) or logging my activity (
) throughout the years. These guys are the real deal, and make outfits like QWorst (
), Comcastigate (
) and AOHell (
) seem like amateur hour.
5 Stars — Am I a nerd (
)?