Dirty Tricks From Our Friends at Charter?
As many of you may know, I am in the process of starting up a small business. There’s a lot involved. The most important service to me is internet connectivity, so I’m doing some price comparisons.
Asheville, unfortunately, only has a couple of choices in my price range that I am aware of:
- Charter Small Business cable internet service
- Bell South DSL internet service
Although I currently use Charter 10/1 here at home, and I’m happy with the service for the most part, I’ve definitely had my issues with them. And don’t get me started on the price difference between residential and business service. It’s criminal.
But the problem I’m having now seems much more insidious. From home, I have not been able to access http://smallbusiness.bellsouth.com (owned by ATT) for weeks. It appears that Charter may be filtering traffic to that address. At least that’s the only explanation I can come up with.
All my friends who enjoy ATT DSL have no problem browsing to http://smallbusiness.bellsouth.com. And I can SSH to my Slicehost machine on an outside network and get there as well. But from home I always, always, always get a network timeout.
I don’t think it’s DNS - the hostname resolves just fine. Lookit - this is from my home machine:
Otherland:$ wget http://smallbusiness.bellsouth.com --08:49:37-- http://smallbusiness.bellsouth.com/ => `index.html' Resolving smallbusiness.bellsouth.com... 139.76.72.15 Connecting to smallbusiness.bellsouth.com|139.76.72.15|:80... failed: Operation timed out. Retrying.
And this is from Slicehost:
lance ~: wget http://smallbusiness.bellsouth.com --08:49:14-- http://smallbusiness.bellsouth.com/ Resolving smallbusiness.bellsouth.com... 139.76.72.15 Connecting to smallbusiness.bellsouth.com|139.76.72.15|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 12100 (12K) [text/html] Saving to: `index.html' 100%[=====================================>] 12,100 --.-K/s in 0.04s 08:49:15 (280 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [12100/12100]
If any of you folks are network experts, I would love to hear your theories….
