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"Would I were dead, if God's good will were so, For what is in this world but grief and woe?" - Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3

It's hard for me to believe and difficult to accept but apparently it is true that my beloved ISP is now, or soon will be, a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, the despised (by me) big-box retailer.

From Speakeasy's press release

Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE: BBY) has agreed to acquire Speakeasy, Inc., one of the largest independent broadband voice, data and IT service providers in the United States. This move strengthens Best Buy's technology portfolio in the small business space, delivered through the company's Best Buy For Business unit.

What's so great about Speakeasy?

In no particular order

1. Static IP addresses!
2. Service reliability

3. Fantastic customer service

   From their website: "Online support tickets are personally responded to within 24 hours 90% of tickets are responded to within an hour!"

   I've never waited longer than an hour.

   Real-time tracking of support tickets.

   The amount of information they're willing to expose to the customer is impressive, including the notes entered in the system by support reps.

   Advanced notification of possible service interruptions due to maintenance events.

   They don't just claim they'll attempt to notify customers, they actually do, and weeks in advance

   Real-time info about the general status of Speakeasy's network

4. Useful self-service options

   Allowing customers to submit support tickets and manage services online with real-time tracking of open issues.

5. Reverse DNS entries!

   Simply by submitting a request online.

   From Speakeasy's knowledgebase:

   We would be happy to make this change for you, free of charge.

   I don't recommend asking Comcast about setting up Reverse DNS and PTR records unless you're a masochist. That's if you can get a static address out of them in the first place.

6. OneLink DSL service

   This has finally allowed me to extricate the phone company from my life completely.

7. Free and open sharing of their residential broadband service!

   Customers are even allowed to charge users of their shared service through Speakeasy's NetShare program

8. No port blocking or other similarly detestable things!

Really I could go on. Instead I'll repeat a few of the more important points:

1. Static IP addresses
2. Zero port blocking
3. Policy of allowing open sharing of broadband service

4. Fantastic customer support

   Speakeasy truly has been a company that offers a useful range of services to the benefit of novice and expert users alike, and in so doing they've stood as an important and necessary option for a lot of people. At a time when broadband penetration and service offerings in the US are continuing to fall significantly behind much of the rest of the world (I'll add a list of links in support of this claim), capable independent ISPs like Speakeasy are incredibly important.

Best Buy on the other hand is a company responsible for such reprehensible, lowest common denominator shclock as:

1. Geek Squad,
2. Magnolia Home Theater,
3. (savagely overpriced) Monster cables,

4. and the outright defrauding of customers.

   I'm referring to the recent revelation that Best Buy intentionally cheated customers by operating a second website internal to Best Buy's retail stores, identical to bestbuy.com except that prices on the internal site reflect the higher prices of products in stores, which do not match discounted or otherwise lower advertised prices on the Internet, presumably intended to bring customers into the store. - read about this at Slashdot, read about this at courant.com.

What do all of these things have in common? They all demonstrate a consistent record of attempting to profit at the undue expense of customers.

Let's forget about the criminal fraud charges for a moment and look at an only slightly less offensive example:

Geek Squad will charge $159.00 to connect a single computer (already functional, with ethernet adapter and properly configured software) to an existing wired network.

What work is involved in doing this?: Connecting the computer to the existing switch with a single cable.

If problems are found with the computer, the switch, or some other aspect of the network, there will be additional charges.

Adding insult to injury, Geek Squad will sell you a 14' Cat6 Ethernet cable for $23.99. You can easily find 15' cat6 cables online for approx. $6.00.

It would take any reasonaly adept computer user three minutes to

1. connect a Windows based PC to a wired switch,
2. make the necessary changes to network settings,
3. and confirm that the connection is active

Of course it would require about the same amount of time for Macs and Linux based PCs.

I'm not suggesting that this service has no value. It is absolutely true that not everyone is 'a reasonably adept computer user', and these folks might need some help. But...

By my math that works out to $159.00 (every 3 minutes) x 20 (units of 3 minutes per hour) = $3180.00 per hour + the $18.00 difference in the cost of the cable.

Granted that doesn't take into account travel time required for the Geek Squad 'special agent' to get to your house and back, but at that price they'd still be charging over $1000/per hour if travel involved a first-class non-stop flight across the country (Boston, MA to Los Angeles, CA) with a full fair ticket on any major US airline (price approx. $2000.00 to $2100.00 with less than a week's notice, April 1, 2007).

Best Buy is bad for its consumers and though it may take a little while for this to catch up with us, I predict bad things for Speakeasy customers as well.

I would recommend looking for another ISP, but I've already done that and there aren't any good options at the moment. Other ISPs offer cheaper services and better speeds but do not offer static addressing, sharing of service, or Speakeasy's guarantees against port blocking, let alone decent customer service.

I may end up moving to another ISP for the lower price and better speed. Suffering the restrictions imposed by the other providers' terms of service will mean taking the money saved and using it to pay for web hosting or server colocation.

This may be the best of the bad options for a lot of Speakeasy customers.